November Twenty Six

Genesis ... part two

While going to Calvin, I managed to buy my first ever car, a used 1962 Plymouth Valiant. At the time, Plymouth with their 6-cylinder slant six engine was a pretty good company, and had no viable competition from the Japanese car manufacturers. I really like cars, and I had a successions of several used ones throughout my lifetime. Never bought brand new cars until later after I married. In my last year at Calvin, I moved in to a house lived in by a retired school teacher named RL. She was an orphan in China, and was adopted by an American missionary that went to China in the early 1900s. She was very good to me and took me in as if I was her son. She herself adopted two orphan girls from China and raised them herself, but, by the time I moved in to RL's house, the girls were already gone and have family of their own. I lost touch and contact with them and now I don't even remember their names. RL passed away sometimes during that time, but my memory is fuzzy on the exact time. In the summer of 1969 (I think) my Mom and the rest of my siblings immigrated to the US and we rented a house in Grand Rapids from a church member named Mr. K. He was an older guy, and he was a widower that just married one of the neighbor, and his house became available. We spent that summer together, I took them to picnics at a favorite lake about 30 miles away called Gun Lake. We would pack up our food and portable grill, and while there we would cook typical American food; hot dogs and hamburgers. It was an idyllic summer. That fall I packed up my meager belongings and moved to Ann Arbor, to begin the final leg of my college education.

That summer was also the summer that I met Kathy. She was just 16, and lived a few houses down from where we lived. She and her sisters would come to our house and hang out with us, Chinese/Indonesian boys. I am not sure what got them interested in us, since we spoke funny English, and to them probably funny customs. Her mom and dad are very traditional Dutch American family from Iowa, and thus pretty much a meat and potato kind of family.

I've never dated anyone, and that summer Kathy, her sister and I went to see Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Carpenters. I don't remember which one was the main billing. After that Kathy and I started to become more than just friends. During my years at UofM, I went home almost every weekend to spend time with her. That's about 300 miles round trip for two years. On one of those weekends, I was on my way back to Ann Arbor on a Sunday night in the middle of winter, and I hit a patch of ice on the highway, spun 360 degree, and kept on going. I can only remember one weekend that I spent in Ann Arbor. On that particular weekend, I went home, brought her back to Ann Arbor, went to the UofM game against Ohio State, and brought her back to Grand Rapids, and then went back to school. It was a crazy time. All the the times I sold my football ticket allowance for extra spending money.

I graduated in the Spring of 1972, interviewed with one company and was offered a job at Lear Siegler Inc., in Grand Rapids, Michigan for the huge salary of $10,800.00 I was hired as a hardware design engineer where I designed electronic circuits for the F4 Phantom aircraft. It sounded glorious, but the piece that I worked on is the weapon delivery control panel, principally a little box that has push buttons, and these buttons then send signals to the weapon computer to release whatever ammunition is commanded. For those that don't know, when a physical switch is switch is pressed, little do you realize that the contact points bounced around for a few fractions of a milliseconds, thus sending the computer a signal that says close-open-close-open etc. until it stabilized. This is normally a bad thing because the computer would get confused and could malfunction. My job/design was to make sure that the first instance of closed contact stay closed electronically. That same year, I proposed and marry Kathy. We bought used furnitures, and bought an old house for a mere $7,500.00 Some of that furniture are still at the house in Rockwall.

To be continued.