Over the years, Mom & Dad shared
many stories of their friendships in Connecticut, always with great enthusiasm,
respect and fondness. The people who extended such kindnesses and helped them
to create community held a place in their hearts for a lifetime. It has been a pleasure for me to have
had an opportunity to communicate with some of the children of these amazing
friends. Mom's brief comments in her letters don't do justice to the affection she and my dad felt for their Connecticut friends.
I am delighted to post each day for few days, the wonderful comments that some of these great families have shared about
their parents. I am immensely grateful to each of them for having graciously responded
to my questions and emails and agreed to provide a special look into their
parents’ lives after the Connecticut years.
To each of you and your terrific families, I offer heart-felt thanks!
And so we begin:
To Jim and Bob: Your parents, the first of the New Haven
friends, welcomed B & Bonnie into their home, encouraged B to keep working
toward his degrees, provided them their amusing first experience with spaghetti,
of all things, and offered levelheaded counsel and wisdom when most
needed. Since your dad was finishing
his time at Yale as B was beginning his, he was particularly helpful to B’s
“learning the ropes" on campus and "getting the scoop" on the great professors. Having also
moved to Connecticut from Missouri, this friendship provided a
sense of familiarity and comfort to the newcomers. Thanks so much for writing!
Jim writes:
As my dad finished his PhD in 1943, he almost immediately
joined the Navy and was commissioned a LT(jg) as far as I remember (direct
commission without going through officer candidate school). He was initially trained as an air
intelligence officer and he and my mom went to Norman, Oklahoma for a short
while for training. However, in
its wisdom, the navy soon decided that his skills would be better-used managing
one of the war training programs so he was sent back to New England and became
the executive officer of a V-12 officer-training program at MIT.
I don’t quite know how long this lasted but by the end of
the war he was transferred to the University of Virginia and I believe he was
doing something similar there for the navy. That stint lasted only a year or so and he was subsequently
discharged. Upon discharge, he
took a position at the University of Vermont, again working on the relationship
of industrial needs to the educational system. I vaguely remember living in faculty housing in Vermont but
that, too, was an interim position for my mom and him.
In 1948 he took a position as the superintendent of schools
in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, an upscale bedroom community to the larger
neighbor, Grand Rapids. My
brother, Bob was born there. Dad was
successful and enjoyed the job but became troubled by rumors that one of the
high school counselors was changing grades on transcripts to facilitate the
chances of admission to East Coast colleges for children of wealthy residents. My dad always had a firm sense of
ethics and he managed to get the goods on the woman and fire her. Not always the best strategist, he
subsequently found himself fired by the school board, which was undoubtedly
under pressure from residents who had benefited from the counselor’s
duplicity. Alas, another move
became necessary in 1950.
An old friend from Yale (I believe), Carl Hansey, had joined
the faculty at the University of Southern California and asked my dad to join
him here (I say here because I’ve been at USC for 26 years now). He taught in the School of Education
and had administrative responsibilities in addition to his professorship,
working with the president’s office.
USC was a good fit for a couple of years but with some of the contacts
he had made in California, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) made
him an offer to become their education director for the 11 western states,
based in San Francisco. The offer
was too good for him to decline so we moved to San Mateo, on the peninsula in
1952 and lived there until 1955 when the NAM office moved to Palo Alto, so my
folks bought a house there and my brother and I had a wonderful time for the
next four years in that lovely city.
Dad had been with NAM for almost ten years when he realized that if he
was going to return to academia, he’d better make a move. With close friends in the Schools of
Education at Stanford and UCLA, the two schools made competing offers.
Stanford’s offer was as an associate professor on a short
tenure review of, I believe, three years.
UCLA’s offer was as an associate professor with tenure. After a
good deal of debate, he and my mom chose to move to Los Angeles. Alas, all was not as it appeared
because the UCLA provost demanded that he be hired without tenure but also on a
short tenure review path of three years.
So, the family moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1959 and mom and dad
lived there for the rest of their lives.
My mom contracted rheumatoid arthritis in the mid 1970’s and
suffered through all sorts of medical trials with it. One manifestation was difficulty breathing and ultimately
she succumbed to breathing problems the day after Christmas in 1993 at age
83. As you probably remember, that
was the year of the Northridge earthquake and they lived practically at the
epicenter of the quake. Their
house survived quite well but there was major damage all around the area. I firmly believe that my mother’s
tenuous mental state was seriously compromised by the event and she was ready
to go by the end of that year. Mom
had worked for a while in Palo Alto adult school teaching sewing and tailoring
and sought to continue teaching upon the move to Los Angeles but she did not
have a California teaching credential and as a result could only teach in
private schools. She did for a
while but not enough to call it a career.
She was active in her church women’s group, the textile committee of the
Better Business Bureau, a couple of women’s philanthropic groups and kept
herself more than busy with the annual Christmas bazaar and other similar
events.
Dad retired from UCLA in 1978 (at age 67) and continued to
be active in the statewide academic senate where he succeeded in securing
additional benefits for emeritus faculty members at all nine UC campuses. He said that he liked being a “union
organizer” better than being a professor.
Judging from how his students liked him, I doubt that was true but I do
know that he enjoyed that role.
In 1995 while visiting his niece outside of Springfield,
Missouri, he came across a photo of an old sweetheart and got in touch with
her. As luck would have it, she
had been widowed after a long career in business and the two got together. One thing led to another and in 1996
they were married. She also had
two sons and we maintain a relationship with the two of them. Sadly, Dorothy was killed in a car
accident in 1997 that my dad survived but he never forgave himself for the
accident.
After an amazing life that began by riding a mule to a
country school from his dad’s livery stable, he went on to amass hundreds of
thousands of air miles traveling in the 1950s. He had seen a dramatic change in the world yet he remained a
kind of farm boy at heart. He was
active in the Northridge Congregational Church, his work at UCLA and on
statewide and national education committees and was proud to have celebrated 50
years of marriage to our mom. So,
when he died in 1998 as a result of emphysema he was ready to go. We miss him yet he had a fascinating
life.
My brother Robert (Bob) is a retired landscape architect and
lives in La Crescenta, town near Glendale on the east side of the Los Angeles
basin. He and his wife, Merle,
have two children, Laura who is married with two kids and Jeffrey who is not
married and has a career as a construction manager for a large apartment
builder.
My best,
Jim
NOTE from Ann: Please check tomorrow for another friend profile.
NOTE from Ann: Please check tomorrow for another friend profile.
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