World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, American; World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
I painted with my father and Clarence as Gordon had his own business
and Leon was working at Brigham Hall. There was not much work that
first winter, but I did get a chance to help Leon for a couple of
months at Brigham Hall. The next spring we had the chance to rent the
house on Mason Street where Sands and Millie Mullins had been living.
I went to Rochester and had a good talk with the landlord whom I
convinced to rent it to us. At that time the rent was only $25 a
month and as soon as the Mullins moved out, we moved in. While living
there our daughter Lynn was born on April 22, 1947.
During the summer of i946 we took a trip to Kirksville, Missouri to
visit Bruce and his wife Marie. Paul Maxwell, one of the pilots I had
flown with in England, lived in Tarre Haute, Indiana and I had his
address so we stopped to see him. His wife was home and told me where
he worked so I looked him up. It was some kind of a factory or office
building and I was walking down a corridor when I saw him ahead of me
so I caught up, tapped him on the shoulder and said 'hi'. He was very
surprised and we spent the evening with dinner at their home. We
stayed in a motel and drove to Missouri the next day. Bruce was just
getting settled in and lived in a small older house off the main
road. We stayed several days with them, talking, fishing and going on
picnics. We arrived there on a Saturday and stayed up half the night
talking and drinking. The next morning we awoke with terrific
hangovers and Just barely made it through church services. In the
afternoon Marie made a container of soup to take to Bruce's
grandfather who was 90 years old and had just returned from the
hospital after having a leg amputated. He was gone when we got there
and we found him down at a pool hall telling all his buddies about
the operation. They are tough old birds in that part of the country.
Bruce was a woodworking teacher at the high school and later he moved
to Santa Rosa, California to teach there. On weekends he taught
woodworking to prisoners at Alcatraz. We had a good time with Bruce
and Marie and although we never got together again, we corresponded
for years. The big Swede, Al Johnson, owned and operated a motel
'Shady Rest' on a lake in Minnesota and he wrote several times and
invited us up for a free vacation, but we never got there.
Back home we looked forward to Lynn's birth and then her childhood
years. When Lynn was about two years old we were visiting with our
neighbors Ted and Gertrude Smith and several of their friends one
evening. Lynn was sitting of the floor and everyone was sitting
around her talking. Suddenly Lynn spoke up saying "Daddy looks
different than Mommy in the bathtub". The room. was immediately
enveloped in a deadly silence and my heart stopped beating. Then Lynn
finished saying "Daddy has wrinkles on his belly" and everyone
doubled over with laughter. That came close to being my most
embarrassing moment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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