November Twenty Nine

Genesis ... Part Four

When we moved to Fort Wayne in 1977 for my stint at the second company, we wanted a house with a basement, but, alas, it seemed that all the newer houses they built there were built on slab. So we started talking to the Realtor about wanting to built one with a basement. We were discouraged from doing so, saying that the clay ground in the area is just not the right kind of dirt for basements. Well, we actually managed to get a two story colonial style house built with a basement. The builder put in a french drain outside the foundation, and inside the basement there is a well with sump pump running on the electric power. This was a nice change from our old house in Michigan. The basement pump worked well as long as we had power. One day, we lost power for an extended amount of time, and the water table started to rise in the basement, and without any power for the pump we had flooded basement for a while until the power came back.

Several times a week, one of my co-worker named Harry T. would come over after work and we'd have a ping-pong game in the basement. He was actually the one that later got me interested in playing tennis. I think that was the time that Prince came up with oversize aluminum racquet with the green plastic trim. And Vic Braden had a weekly tennis program on TV called "Tennis for the Future". Fort Wayne was a good place to raise a family, and we were blessed to have been there and be involved with the church family that we belonged to. We played softball ( I broke my collar bone after colliding with the second basement in an attempt to retrieve a pop up), help with sandbagging during one of the flooding that occurred periodically in downtown Fort Wayne, and enjoyed the many fine produced planted by the Amish communities around the area.

In 1982, I was offered took a job in the Boston area. I went there first, leaving the family behind, and lived in an apartment for a while. As in Fort Wayne, we looked for a used house, but ended up with a brand new house, in Milford, Massachusetts.

During my years in MA, I was involved with another goverment program called Milstar, a system similar to the one called GPS now, and also with one called SDI (strategic defense initiative). I don't remember what became of Milstar, but the SDI program eventually died. The only remnant of it is the missile shooting capability recently demonstrated when the US fired a missile to blow up a failing satellite that was about to re-enter the earth carrying dangerous hydrazine fuel. As a family, every time we had visitors from out of town, we'd go to downtown Boston to see Faneuill Hall, the Boston Aquarium, and sometimes tour the old wooden ship that is moored in the Boston Harbor. When we first moved to the neighborhood in Milford, we were quite isolated, and to us it seemed that the people there are quite reclusive, so we held a neighborhood party to get to know our neighbors. One of them, the Revzin family became our best friends. Kathy ran with P almost daily, including the Boston Marathon once, and D and I did a few things together, such as driving to New Hampshire to buy our first ever IBM PC with green monochrome monitor. Soon after, Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh, and I was enthralled by it and ended up with one that has a meager 128MB memory with no hard drive, but it could do word processing, drawing, and spreadsheet using user friendly interface instead of the Lotus 123 command line entries. A friend of mine and myself at work started a company Macintosh User Group called RMUG. Ed King, if you ever come accross this blog, do you remember me?

To be continued.