Family Pics VI

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After my return from Germany in 1972 from my 1971-1972 Junior Year abroad, I had attained consciousness of advanced calculus, Newtonian mechanics, the foundations of electromagnetic field theory, and of the nuclear atom according to Niels Bohr. Physics later lead me to seek business in engineering. I was a ladies man, and believed that love would always be mine to find. I was looking forward to the next few years of physics and mathematics, and to my next girlfriend, if I was without one. My practical Grandad, the president of Mesa Oil and Petroleum, on the other hand, had plenty of interesting stories to tell in the Sunroom at Quentin and 3rd Street. He obtained a job in a bank after working on the railroad, and explained to me what a liberation that was after bitterly struggling one morning after to pry his overworked hands open. After holding a sledge hammer to spike down railroad ties all day his hands had gone rigid the next morning following a night's sleep. He met his wife Mary in a bank in Springfield, Missouri. He was also involved in insurance sales. Finally a cosigner let him down on a loan, he recalled, and after some financial hardship the family moved to Wichita, where Grandad became established in the oil business, having formed a stock company and connected with some partners. He took me to The Petroleum Club for dinner several times and on to vacation in Florida and to beaches on the Atlantic seaboard, as well as to New York, as I have already described. I have a vivid memory of reading about Sputnik [1957 YouTubeVideo, Sputnik 3 Video from 1958] in the newspaper in the Sunroom as a child of 8, where Grandad had us reading National Geographic to excite us about the world of exploration and discovery.

Uncle Wilbur was a general contractor who married my father's sister Aunt Betty. The couple took me on train rides through the Colorado mountains, which was especially memorable. Wilbur built an outside workshop that held his extensive model train system, and lived right next to the railroad tracks. I used to sleep in the guest room across from an 18x24 inch color print of a Boeing B52 airborne above the clouds, and listened to the train come rumbling by at 6:00 AM in the morning like a roll of thunder. Aunt Betty and Uncle Wilbur treated me to Mexican dinners quite a bit, and took me on several other train ride vacations, which they arranged at least once a year. Uncle Wilbur was a hero who worked with his hands, but one day he accidentally cut through a finger on the job. He built many homes and offices alone or together with men he hired, and Grandad Green thought he was an extraordinary artist after examining some grillwork he erected in a new home. Grandma Green taught me my first word of German: "Gesundheit". We were descended from the American Revolutionaries that fought under The Swamp Fox in South Carolina, I was told, and before that, from English immigrants who later intermarried with Germans. I enjoyed watching Swamp Fox adventures on TV as dramatized by Walt Disney. Before my Junior Year in Germany in 1971-1972 I beefed up my vocabulary by reading dual-language books. Aunt Betty and Uncle Wilbur followed Grandad and Grandma Green down to Edinburg, Texas when Grandad retired around 1970 and headed for the palm trees and the orange groves that he had hawked on TV after Mesa Oil and Petroleum was sold. Dad decided not to follow, but we visited a time or two and I remember walking along nearby Padre Island amazed at the huge number of Portuguese Man-of-War jellyfish strewn for miles along the coast from the picturesque dock & boathouse where we had enjoyed lunch together.

My parents moved to this little house on Edgemoor not far from the University, where I was photographed on my 2nd birthday going down the slide on right. Grandma Mayfield sits on the steps in the rear. I lived here through first grade. Later we moved closer to WSU, to Harvard street next to Chemistry professor Bob Christian. On Edgemoor I used to look through a pipe at the sky from inside a crate, pretending I had a telescope. Dad had two sets of binoculars, however. It was at the nearby A&M Root Beer stand that I first recognized a constellation pointed out by Aunt Betty: The Big Dipper, as I drank from an enormous crystal mug of root beer. I was not impressed that constellation symbolism is intrinsically mythical until much later, in the 1990s, when I examined it carefully together with astrophotos of mythically imaging nebulae.

Grandad Green excelled at arranging Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with the family, and held many a sociable bridge party. I had breakfast with him often at Quentin and 3rd, when we usually ate bacon or Canadian bacon with eggs, toast, orange juice and coffee. Otherwise, we had pancakes or waffles instead of toast. On Thanksgiving or Christmas, he would mix up eggnog: one batch for children without alcohol, and another for adults with a little rum added. He took us on fishing trips to a club with a private lake to catch bass and perch, where we could stay overnight in a cabin for campers. He and Grandma had an impressive collection of Floridian sea shells that was featured once in the Sunday Eagle-Beacon. I will never forget the ride on a glass-bottomed boat they treated me to in Florida, with its dramatic view of exotic marine life. Come to think of it, I guess Mom was a glass-bottomed boat when they put me in that one to come out with a cry and study this kettle of folk at the feast of the victors.