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A Baby Boomer's Scrapbook |
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Click on these words to return to Life's School Year Three We didn't last long in
our first apartment. It
was nice enough but it was a basement unit below the landlord and lady who
fought like a cat and dog. My GI
pay was barely enough to get by as a new husband and father and, in order to
afford the small basement apartment that we moved into, Kerri got a job in the
kitchen of a restaurant called the Hitching Post until she was too pregnant to
work. Our first landlord and
landlady lived upstairs and were constantly fighting and very loud so, within a
month or two after we moved in to that place we moved out to another basement
apartment (with a nice family upstairs) until the baby was born.
Unfortunately,
Kerri’s pregnancy experience was not good. At
about 5 months along she got some terrible back pains and, at first, the
military doctor would only provide her with provide pain medication. After more
than a week, the pain got so bad that she was finally admitted to the hospital
where it was discovered that she had a severe kidney infection. She got better
within a few days but there were to be consequences.
I was
allowed a day off from work for son Scott’s birth on September 6th,
1968 but while Kerri was still recovering in the hospital, I was sent off to the
Wyoming prairie on a 3 day work dispatch to do my missile maintenance work. I wasn't given any
time off after the birth and I had to go back out to the field for one my normal
3 day stints. I called and talked to Kerri while she was recovering but
something wasn't quite right. She kept complaining to the nurse of blood in her
urine and the nurse, a Major, just kept telling her that she need to wipe
herself better when she peed. On the morning of the third day, the orderly took
her blood pressure and temperature and found she had almost no pressure and a
temperature of almost more than 105. Turns out that she had bleeding to death from a failed kidney and they had to scramble to get enough blood back into her to survive. They weren't sure that she was going to make it but, without telling me how serious the situation was, they helicoptered me back to the base. I was shocked when I was met on the hospital steps by the hospital commander with sincere apologies and and a promise to do whatever was necessary to save her life. They ended up having to call in a specialist from a local civilian hospital to figure out what was wrong and, after a week or so, she was able to come home with the baby. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of our military health care traumas.
Our second basement apartment was good and the landlord was fine but we didn't stay there long either. Not because of the apartment but because my 2 seat Austin Healey Sprite wasn't going to be big enough for a 3 seat family.
In an attempt to keep up with the young GI image (young and foolish, I think), we bought a near new Pontiac Firebird that I really couldn't afford and we ended up moving in with Kerri's Mom and Dad just to make the payments. We didn't pay rent but did buy all the food for the whole family because the Air Force base grocery store was so much cheaper than the stores off base... With Kerri's Mom and Dad, Uncle Jack and the three of us, we felt a little crowded and as soon as I got promoted with a big enough pay raise that we were able to a large house that had been divided up into 3 apartments where Kerri had a friend who lived downstairs in the basement unit... It was a bit small too but gave us the independence that we wanted... The pay raise also gave me enough extra cash that I foolishly used to buy a motorcycle so I could ride with my other GI friends who had them...
In addition to the motorcycle I rode around the Wyoming prairie with friends, I made friends with a guy named Tom Wingett who had a BMW sedan that he used for local parking lot races and a Formula C race car that he used for real road racing. I ended up being his crew whenever we went to races at nearby Castle Rock Raceway just north of Colorado Springs and had a lot of fun doing that... ;-)
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