LAURA

In this story, I recall the arrival of our second child. 02/29/2016

LAURA

Our married life had settled into a familiar routine. Angie minded Jamie while I spent five days a week at my job. The close proximity of my office to our apartment allowed me to drive home for lunch and enjoy their company. Jamie grew more beautiful by the month, her hair becoming ever so curly.

Angie became pregnant again, and we wondered whether Jamie would have a sister or a brother. The answer came on July 21, 1957 with the birth of our second daughter, Laura Lynn at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, a full-term healthy and happy baby. From the outset, Laura displayed prominent cheek features which led us to call her our “dimpled darling.”

Shortly before her birth, we moved to a duplex on 48th Street in San Mateo, just a few blocks from our previous residence. Above our ground floor apartment lived a divorcee with two pre-teen boys. We referred to her as the “Sergeant” because of her stern and gruff demeanor. She seemed to be a mean spirited, unsmiling, cranky person. We missed not having the Morans for neighbors.

Our duplex adjoined some other units, and we soon made friends with a number of their tenants, including Lois and Ralph Hardy. Their oldest son weighed a ton. One day I lifted this bundle of “joy” over the fence to allow him to play with Jamie and paid the price in the form of a strained groin that later herniated.

Cars were always my bane. Angie needed a car, so we bought an old Ford, whose year and style I don’t recall. Meanwhile, my ’51 Studebaker began to malfunction. We couldn’t afford a new car, so we decided to accept an offer from Ralph, a United Air Lines mechanic, to replace the engine with one he helped me buy from a junkyard. Afterwards, a California D.M.V. inspector discovered that the engine block number did not agree with the one on the bill of sale. It took me quite a while to convince the authority figure the engine had not been stolen. 

Kay and Ian McClellan lived next door to the Hardys. They were a fun loving couple. He worked as a sales representative for the Crown Cork Corporation, the company that manufactured cork inserts once found in bottle caps. He quit his job in order to buy a run-down soda bottling company in Oakland whereupon he fired all the firm’s delivery drivers. He then offered to sell them the trucks and work for him as independent commissioned sales agents. This allowed him to shift the burden of truck maintenance and sales effort directly to the drivers, significantly reducing his overhead expenses.

The McClellans bought a small house on a large lot in nearby San Carlos. Ian designed and built a truly unique addition to the home, choosing to leave a tree standing in the middle of the new add-on. He installed glass walls around the tree’s trunk. This design allowed natural light to illuminate the interior of the house and provided an interesting view of the tree’s branches high above the roof, a spectacular architectural accomplishment. The front of the new room had large windows from which you could see the San Francisco bay.

 One evening Angie and I spent hours with Ian and Kay trying to think up catchy names for the new soda flavors he wanted to introduce. His business had begun to thrive. However, the Cuban missile crisis caused sugar prices to soar, and this forced him out of business.  

Kay went by the nickname, “Sparky.”  She allowed her pregnant unmarried friend, now a Stanford graduate student, to live with them while awaiting the birth. This girl went by the nickname, “Peaches.” When Kay’s parents announced their intention to visit, Sparky asked if Peaches could room with us until her parents left. We agreed, and for upwards of a month, we had the pleasure of her company.

It astonished us that Peaches gave up her baby up for adoption. Later, we learned she finished graduate school, married happily, and had a number of children.

In a recent phone discussion with Kay, who now lives in Florida, she said Peaches informed her husband and children of her first child. They made an unsuccessful effort to trace its whereabouts. It seems all her family wished she had kept the baby. 

Another neighbor, Joe Capps, had worked his way through college as a carpenter while studying to be a chemist. He later realized he could make more money pounding nails than in mixing reagents, and abandoned his efforts to work in his academic field. He bought a residential lot in Redwood City on which he built a unique four-bedroom home. He sold it before he could move in. He repeated this scenario. In a short time, he became a recognized builder of custom homes. Years later, he bought a tract of land at Half Moon Bay and built a large development there. His two-story homes featured wall-to-wall stone fireplaces, both in the living room and the master bedroom above. He told me it did not cost that much to incorporate this feature, but added so much in style and appearance that his homes sold quickly.

FWC‘s cooling tower sales increased, thanks to its new design, and it appeared that the department would begin earning money. But the competition for business made it difficult. In order to secure business, we began offering towers incorporating unique features and very large diameter fans, unproven in service. Our customers included many large firms in the electric utility business and process plants industry. They expected our cooling towers to perform as specified and we guaranteed they would.  Not all of them did.

None of these matters concerned Laura. She thrived on our love and affection.

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