Engineer Memoirs
That was a time that I felt I really did look for a support group, if you call it that. There
were so many friends here. I play golf, and we belonged to the ArmyNavy Country
Club. So I wanted to have that opportunity to play golf. That's another whole circle of
friends who are military, but are not our friends through the military. They're our
friends through golf.
Q:
How many kids were there by 1958?
A:
Three.
Q:
And they must have been a full-time job?
A:
Yes. They were. They were a challenge. When Ernie went, they were two, four, and six
years old.
Q:
So they were starting school.
A:
Ralph was starting school. I don't know how many of our little family stories you want
in this. But Ralph entered first grade just after Ernie went to Korea. I decided I needed
a vacation. My mother came to take care of Ralph and Willy, who was two. And I took
Robby, who was four, with me and went to New England to visit friends.
While I was gone, my mother got a message from the school that they had given Ralph
a test and they were very disturbed by it, because he had totally flunked the reading
readiness test. They thought he was a bright child and they couldn't understand. Well,
it seems that the test was not appropriate to the child because he had been reading for
two years at that point. And to give him a reading readiness test when he was already
reading just didn't work. That was just one of the things that happened.
Q:
But, you know, life is filled with these little crises--and they are at the time, aren't they,
because you don't know what the--
A:
I really wasn't upset. I knew the child could read, which they didn't know--couldn't
figure out.
We spent one year there. It was a good year. It went very fast. We kept very busy. I
always made an effort to be upbeat about all of these things. Before Ernie left--and he
took about two months leave, I think, before he left--I heard my son Ralph, again, out
in the neighborhood where somebody had asked when his father was going to leave,
saying, "We don't know, but we certainly wish he'd hurry and go because we are going
to have so much fun after he is gone."
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