I went with John as a freshman then I went with other kids and he did too. But we were always friends. Senior year we ended up dating and he went into the service. Even though you dated in those days, you did things in groups.
In nursing school, he was in the service. We would go out if I was allowed out. I would have to go out at four and return at 7. But we wrote letters constantly. You weren’t allowed to be engaged until you were a senior. We got engaged in March of ‘58. Then he called very late in the year, a couple of months before the wedding and said “I am going to Germany, are you coming?” So we had the big wedding January 3rd and left after two weeks.
We had a couple of disasters for the wedding, like every wedding. We called to check on the hall to check up on the hall and they said, “There is no wedding tomorrow.” My dad, who is really cool, calm, and collected, was getting ready to blow his cool, but then it worked out.
We got married and left the next day. It was the worst snowstorm in the history of Pennsylvania in 100 years, so we only got to Bradford which is a forty minute drive, in eight hours. And we got a flat tire. John had to go out and it was so cold. So that was our big honeymoon and we did all of the big history sights.
Then he left for Germany in two weeks and I couldn’t go for three more months. We started the family right away. I was pregnant when we went to Germany. I had John C. nine months later. He was born in October. That flying over was a big deal because I had never left Pennsylvania except to go to New Jersey when I was a kid. My father went with me from Pittsburg to New York and then I was on my own from New York to Germany.
Stories from Our Life in Germany
Now remember that I was a wimpy kid. It was a seventeen-hour flight from New York to Germany. When I get off the plane, there were all of these men in green uniforms and black boots and I was sure that Hitler was there.
John picked me up in a German Ford that only went 35 miles an hour. We lived in two rooms in Germany. We had a twelve-inch, two-burner hot plate for a stove and a twelve-inch oven below it. We had no hot water. You had to make a fire under the water heater to take a bath once a week. To wash clothes, you had a big copper cauldron that you made a fire under and you boiled your clothes. Then you had to take them out and rinse them in tubs of cold water. It took all day to do clothes. It was an interesting life.
We bought our vegetables from a vegetable man coming around, and we bought milk from a man who would come around. I learned some German words. I could understand it really well. I could walk through the neighborhood and they would talk about this American person, and I understood every word that they said but they didn’t know it.
We picked up all of the German traditions for Christmas, very similar to ours. We had a lot of good times with the German couples. We played Canasta and bid 500. We played scrabble in English and German. There was a lot of cheating.
We did a lot of trips with the eight of us, visiting different parts of Germany. We did a lot of walking in the woods and having coffee and cake. We learned all of this stuff while we were over there. We wanted to stay but they wouldn’t let us. Then we went to Albuquerque and that was good too.
I liked the air force life. We liked moving, meeting all of the people, having the new experiences. We still have friends from there. It was never boring because we were always on a new adventure.
The part of Albuquerque that was bad was that they would send him away and it was tough because I wouldn’t know how long he would be gone. But the kids had my family. Moving was fine, the people were great. Then we moved here and the kids started growing up and I started working and life got a lot busier. The kids got into sports and stuff. Then John started drinking. I am grateful for AA. My daughter got into pre-alateen.
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