MAD ABOUT THE BOY

Male call. Our first son is born. 02/29/2016 

MAD ABOUT THE BOY

Despite my reluctance to buy a house, I bravely agreed with Angie that we should have another baby, hoping it would be a boy. It really did not make any difference to us, as another girl would fit into our lives just as readily and perhaps more so. From the different way she carried, Angie decided our next infant would be a male which indeed it turned out to be.

Barry Gerard came into our lives on August 19, 1960, and made a welcome addition to the family. He arrived on time at Sequoia Hospital, Redwood City, where Angie had become a well-known patient, a frequent flier, if you will. Barry checked in at 8 pounds, 9 ounces, the heaviest birth weight of any of our children.

He received quite a homecoming. Angie’s sister Jo had decided to visit us to give Angie a hand. Some hand. She brought along her two children, Linda and Joseph, six and four respectively. The three of them screamed at each other continuously, so it seemed. Their constant bickering upset me.

To make matters worse, our three oldest and Jo’s two children got strep throats. The pharmacist looked at the prescription and asked, "How the hell many sick kids do you have?" At home, we set up a production line, spooning penicillin down their throats.

After Jo returned to New York, we took the plunge and arranged to purchase our first house, located at 20 Burgoyne Court, San Mateo in a development of six hundred homes built by a man named Eichler. Our 1,800 sq. ft. four-bedroom, two-bath ranch home featured exterior redwood siding, exposed Douglas fir beams that supported a flat tar roof, radiant heat floors and Philippine mahogany plywood walls. Floor-to-ceiling glass panels in the master bedroom and living room gave the house an airy and open feeling. We fell in love with this dream house, even if we were the second owners. Eichler-built homes became the rage in later years, and remain in demand to this day.

While we were ecstatic at living in such a beautiful home, we experienced a new problem. Jamie began to stutter early in 1960, shortly before Barry’s birth. At the same time, she began to exhibit obstinate behavior, such as refusing to hold my hand while out walking, running to the end of the street, attempting to cross over by herself, unwilling to stay with the family while out shopping or in church. She wanted to play in front of the house on a busy street, rather than the fenced back yard.  

We tried everything to make her stop stuttering. Nothing worked until we followed the recommendation of a pediatrician, Dr. Podolksy, who suggested we give Jamie more freedom. We had just moved to our new home. A few days later, we opened the front door, and told Jamie she could go out and play. In two weeks, Jamie stopped stuttering, and never did so again.  By the end of the year, we were one big happy family again.

The Christmas season of 1960 remains one of our most memorable. That year we bought an aluminum tree for $20, complete with rotating stand and spinning color light wheel. It made the Season bright. We surrounded it with gifts of every sort. But my job appeared to be in jeopardy, and that cast some gloom on my spirit.

Foster Wheeler’s cooling tower business continued to decline amid ruthless competition. Rumors abounded that FWC might sell its cooling tower business to a rival. It seemed likely my employment in this field would end. I had no work experience that remotely qualified me for work in the Silicon Valley high-tech industry. At the time, the Lockheed Corporation’s Polaris Missile contract ended and the company laid off thousands of workers from its Sunnyvale plant, few of whom could find jobs. Many families abandoned their homes and moved away. 

As the financial misfortunes of the cooling tower department continued to sink, a new cloud formed over the business. Customers began to report that many existing towers made of redwood were exhibiting signs of rot. The company appointed me to serve on a Technical Committee of the Cooling Tower Institute, investigating wood preservatives designed to extend the life of towers made of redwood or Douglas fir. This committee met periodically at different cities around the country to discuss the issue. A few members decided to shorten the official name to the “Drunk Committee,” which gives you some idea of the party atmosphere that prevailed at these meetings. One year we met in El Paso. At the end of our session, we headed across the border to Juarez, a rather sordid Mexican border town, a bad scene. In one dive, we heard three young men singing great songs. They called themselves the Kingston Trio.

Another time the committee met in New Orleans. After drinking three martinis, my cohorts persuaded me to down a raw oyster, a combination not in the best interest of society. I do not recommend swallowing them in either order.

The company grasped at straws, trying to avoid the inevitable. We offered towers of radical new designs in order to bring in revenue. Things kept getting worse. By early 1961, my job boat began sinking into the sea of unemployment. Would Barry, our fourth child, soon to celebrate his first birthday, do so without any gifts? That would surely make the boy mad.

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THANK HEAVEN FOR LITTLE GIRLS

Another year, another girl. 02/29/2016

THANK HEAVEN, FOR LITTLE GIRLS

Before you could say peek-a-boo, our next child, Ellen Bridget arrived on July 13, 1959 at Sequoia Hospital, Redwood City, a healthy and precious infant. Angie had given birth to three girls in the space of thirty one months, the last two eight days shy of one year apart.

Shortly after her birth, we brought Ellen to our pediatrician, Dr. Roth, for a routine office visit. While he examined her, Laura turned to Angie and spoke a complete sentence, “Give the baby her pacifier.” Dr. Roth whirled around and asked, “Who said that?”  He could not believe that Laura could speak that well at such an early age. Neither could we.

Ellen was a fantastic addition to our family. People would stop us when we were out shopping, to tell us what beautiful children we had. Angie dressed our three girls in style. Our 8-mm Kodak home movie films provide visual proof of just how adorable they looked.  

In a few months time all three girls shared the same bedroom. Jamie and Laura each slept in their own twin bed, while Ellen resided in her crib, usually the last one wishing to sleep, anxious to go forward with her life.

Girls are great. However, we began thinking it might be nice if we could add a boy to our family. With that possibility in mind, we began looking to buy a house, a prospect that filled me with trepidation, having never lived in anything but apartments all my life. The thought of a 30-year mortgage made me cringe. It seemed like such a financial burden.

Our search took us to Redwood City where we found a beautiful new four-bedroom home for $20,000. We left a $100 deposit as a good faith offer to buy the house. As we drove home, I began to sweat with worry. All night long, my brain reeled with nervous anxiety, preventing me from sleeping. In the morning, I convinced Angie we could not afford to pay the mortgage, and insisted we retrieve our deposit. This change of heart disappointed Angie. She knew we could have paid the mortgage. Her judgment has always been better than mine when it came to financial matters.

Ellen exhibited no interest in this affair. She slept the nights away, probably dreaming of lions, elephants and baggy-pants clowns.

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GOING BACK TO HOUSTON, HOUSTON, HOUSTON

This short article describes my one and only presentation of a technical paper to a meeting of Professional Engineers.02/29/2016

GOING BACK TO HOUSTON, HOUSTON, HOUSTON

In 1958, FWC made two managerial changes. It promoted Dennis O’Neil to Sales Manager, Steam Generator Division, which required him to move back to NYC. The company selected Ernie Goitein to replace him as Manager, Cooling Tower Department. In turn, he promoted me to be Assistant Manager. The title carried with it no new duties and no salary adjustment that I can recall.

A year later, Ernie asked me to write a technical paper describing three unusual cooling tower applications, for submittal to the American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM), who published it in their Special Technical Publication No. 273 dated October 15, 1959.

Ernie wrote the bulk of the paper. You can imagine my unease when FWC reprinted the article in its house organ which led to an unwanted invitation from our Houston sales representative, Wilson Pais, whom I’d accompanied on a sales call some years earlier. He summoned me to read it at a monthly meeting of the Houston Engineer’s Club. The prospect of facing an audience of Professional Engineers cowed me, my first such experience.

My worst fears came to fruition. After presenting the paper, a number of people in the audience posed questions regarding the application of cooling towers in various settings. The torture went on for about fifteen minutes, but it seemed like an eternity to me. Wilson keep interjecting, trying to help me respond.

In the morning, I slunk out of town, dreading the consequences of my pathetic presentation. As best I can recall, there were no repercussions. It must be noted that Wilson never invited me back to Houston, in any capacity. Is it any wonder?

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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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I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE UNDER MY FEET

Earthquakes are common in California. This story recounts one that rattled San Mateo in 1957. 02/29/2016

I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE UNDER MY FEET

In the spring of 1957, things were going well for us and for our neighbors, Pat and Kate Moran, who lived in the apartment directly below us in our six-family unit. Pat had recently joined the Belmont city police force but had not received much training. He spent his first night on duty sitting in a police car up in the hills overlooking the community, pushing buttons, trying to figure out which one operated the siren. While Pat and I worked, our wives spent many hours together, discussing motherhood and its virtues.      

During the summer of 1957, a moderate earthquake hit the Bay area in mid-afternoon. I rushed home from my nearby downtown San Mateo office, while Pat raced home in his patrol car, both of us concerned about the well-being of our wives and babies. We found them huddled together in Pat’s apartment, unharmed but still frightened. When the quake hit, they said they left the babies on the couch and took cover in the doorway.

Pat then played a dirty trick. He went into the adjoining bedroom, thumped his fists against the wall, hard enough to shake the living room pictures, simulating an aftershock. True to form, our wives again ran to the nearest door, this time abandoning both babies on the couch. Quakes are frightening events.

  Shauna, the Moran’s baby girl, had to wear shoes attached to a steel bar while sleeping in her crib to avoid becoming pigeon-toed. Upon awakening, she pounded the bar against the sides of the crib, making a deafening sound. It is a wonder she did not chop the crib to pieces.

  Not long after Pat joined the force he had a chance to demonstrate his police skills in our apartment building. Awakened by a commotion, he went barefooted into the basement laundry room, where he cornered a teenage boy who had been stealing lingerie from the clotheslines. The kid put a move on him and escaped. We howled with laughter that a member of the “Panties Police” had failed to catch a culprit trapped in a room that had only one exit.

  Another couple who lived in our apartment we found to be delightfully offbeat.  The pregnant wife, who hailed from Fiji, hated doing the family wash. As she grew larger, her supply of underpants diminished. Rather than buy new ones designed to accommodate her expanding tummy, she chose to wear her husband's skivvies, which she showed off to one and all with great indifference to propriety. Fijians live by a different set of social rules, we learned.    

Our lovely apartment had only one bedroom. When Angie became pregnant with our second child, we decided to move to a larger place, a duplex apartment just a few blocks away, on 48^th Street. It had many nice features, including two spacious bedrooms, a kitchen large enough to eat in, and a big living/dining room, complete with a fireplace. The washer-dryer units were located in the garage, just steps away from the kitchen door. The fenced back yard had numerous blooming rose bushes. One bedroom had a wonderful mural painted on a wall, a carousel circus scene, a perfect backdrop for young children.

We had access to our new apartment for a week before moving which allowed me time to paint the kitchen to match the colors of the one we were leaving. When the time came to move, Angie and Kate Moran, the neighbor with whom she had shared an earthquake experience, cried.

As the song goes, they were “All shock up.”

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BABY FACE

Our child won first prize in a baby contest. Okay, there were no other entries. 02/29/2016

BABY FACE

We decided to call our new infant, “Jamie Lee,” after seeing this name in the society page of the local paper shortly before her birth. Her unusual name caused some people to think we had a baby boy. Jamie did not care for her name while growing up. Later, she changed the spelling of her middle name to “Leigh” and is now quite pleased with her moniker. 

Jamie arrived on time, a full term perfectly healthy baby. We had bought just about everything needed for a newborn: Crib, bassinet, furniture, playpen, carriage. You name it; we had it. We were elated to bring her into our home, and looked forward to becoming ideal parents. We had no idea how difficult this task would be during the next few weeks. Our idyllic concept of parenthood soon ended when we could not soothe Jamie who cried and cried. We had expected some crying, but her screams were constant and unending. After ten days of sleeplessness, we were both completely unnerved.

One experience illustrates my state of mind. A man knocked on our apartment door, introduced himself as a representative of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and stuck out his hand to shake mine. Without comment, I slammed the door in his face. Luckily, he pulled his hand out of the way before the door slammed shut with a resounding bang. A few days later, he phoned to apologize for making a cold call.

“No, I am the one who should apologize for being so rude. At the moment, we have no interest in buying insurance.” Had he been peddling sleeping pills, we would have invited him in for dinner.

At her two-week checkup, the pediatrician said Jamie had lost weight and advised Angie to give up her efforts to breast-feed. Jamie’s cries were ones of starvation. As soon as we started feeding her formula, she became a happy infant, and we regained our sanity.

Parents in those days cared for their infants using cloth diapers and sterilized powdered milk. The convenience of Pampers and packaged formula were years away. Should Jamie awake before we had time to sterilize the next batch of milk, we had to endure her screams while we rushed to get the pot of water boiling. Nothing made me feel more despondent than having to delay feeding her because we lacked sterilized milk. In time, we became more pragmatic. To hell with germs. To hell with Dr. Spock.  Give the kid something to drink, sterilized or not. Naturally, Jamie thrived, and so did we.

Initially, we ordered diaper service. In short order, we found it far more convenient to wash the diapers ourselves. Learning how to pin a diaper, now a lost art, took me quite a while to master. I punctured Jamie on more than one occasion.

All parents believe their first baby is the most special person in the world, and we were no exception. By the time Jamie turned six months, she had become gloriously angelic in our eyes. She had an olive complexion and curly black hair. Angie dressed her in new clothes every day, so it seemed. We were bursting with pride and happiness. A stranger had come and turned our world into something magical.

In the summer of 1957, we spent our vacation in New York in order to show Jamie to our relatives. While visiting my parents, my mom placed Jamie on the fire escape for some nice fresh Hoboken air. Angie gasped, and stood petrified. She thought my mother had put Jamie’s life at risk and couldn’t wait to retrieve her. Home movies show my parents, leaning out the front window, waving good-bye to us as we returned to California, a treasured memory from that trip.

The TWA flight from New York to San Francisco took about 18 hours, a tortuous journey. The plane made frequent stops all across the country, including an extended layover in Kansas City, during which time the passengers remained on board the aircraft. Poor Angie. She sat there in sweltering heat, cuddling Jamie while suffering from an infection. The round trip airfare of $175 had seemed like quite a bargain, but it cost us a lot more in discomfort. Jamie did not mind. She never cried a peep nor did she file a complaint with the police.

Despite the ordeal, our trip convinced us that we had made a wise decision to move to the West Coast. San Mateo had so much more to offer us than Hoboken or Brooklyn, our roots.

As 1957 came to an end, we looked back and realized how much we had experienced in our marriage. We had risen from the despair of miscarriage to the elation of childbirth. We felt grateful and pleased.

Early on in our marriage, we agreed that she would control the purse strings. She had proven to be a far better at money manager than I. During the brief time we were wed, she paid off the costs of furnishing our apartment and a vacation trip back east without the need to borrow or resort to credit. 

Infants dominated our lives. Our neighbors, Pat and Kate Moran, had their first baby, whom they named Shauna, a few days after Jamie had been born. Angie’s friend, Frances (and husband Ted) Lysten, whom she met while employed at Lenkurt Electric, also gave birth to a girl about the same time. The three new moms compared notes seemingly every day.

We stayed close to home; content to take weekend drives around the area. We were both very domesticated cats. It overjoyed me to play the role of “Dad.”  I took especial delight in giving Jamie her first bath as Angie found it a challenge to handle a squirming wet and soapy infant. Marriage and fatherhood suited me, and although Angie missed her family very deeply, being a wife and a mother pleased her.

We willingly surrendered ourselves to the role of parenting, wholeheartedly. We devoted all our time to Jamie, relishing every new day in her life. Call us prejudiced, but we felt our child to be the most beautiful baby on earth, a real blue-ribbon winner.

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HELLO, MY BABY

I became a daddy in 1956. Read all about it. 02/292016

HELLO, MY BABY!

While driving home from an office cocktail party on a rainy day in late December 1955, Angie spotted a virtually empty Christmas tree lot.

 “Let’s stop and get one.”

The operator gave us the last one he had: FREE. He wanted to go home. The man tied it atop our Studebaker, and I managed to drag it into the apartment. Angie fell asleep on the couch watching me set it up. Unfortunately, it did not produce much joy.

A few days before Christmas, Angie suffered a miscarriage. Dr. Joseph Waddell made an urgent house call and confirmed the obvious. He assured us that first pregnancies often end this way, and expressed confidence we would have children in the future. At the time, his assurance did not fill us with optimism. 

Rain fell almost every day in San Mateo that winter causing the worst localized flooding in the city’s history. One day a house atop the hill near our apartment came off its foundation and slid down a ravine. That event, coupled with the gloomy weather, made Angie very despondent. Every day she longed to return to New York.

The State of California had rejected Angie’s claim for unemployment insurance as she had resigned her position voluntarily. This added to her malaise. Anxious to return to the workforce, in January she found a job in nearby Belmont with the Lenkurt Electric Company. Despite her previous experience as an Executive Secretary, she could not command as much pay as she had been earning in Manhattan prior to our marriage.

As Dr. Waddell had predicted, Angie became pregnant soon again and had to quit her job to await our first child, a girl, born November 30, 1956, at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City. Could life be sweeter? 

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