Homes I've Lived In-#9, #10, and #11

YUMA!!! the name says it all. we referred to it as "You Mother...."! so dang hot. all the time! relentless and boring for one year and nine months!

After packing up and leaving Millington, we headed back to Buffalo Center to see our folks before we had to leave for Yuma. The trip took us two days. Jill was a very good traveler, especially with her new car-seat to ride in! It was the latest thing... a sling canvas seat with two hooks at the back so it hooked over the front of the front seat or the back seat so she could see outside the car. Not exactly safe by today's standards, but it was something! We stopped in Scottsdale to see my sister Joyce and her husband Butch Jenkins and finally reached Yuma in mid-October, 1969.

We found a place to rent (#9) located on the far west edge of Yuma at 1111-15th Drive. It was another tin shack-style apartment, probably built during WWII to house soldier's families. Absolutely no insulation! It was "air-cooled". Down there they had a system for cooling a home called "refrigeration". It involved a unit up on the roof and water. Not sure how it worked, but it was totally different from our modern air-conditioning. We lived there only six weeks until the end of 1969. It cost $75 a month to rent and came furnished.

I got to know one of the neighbors very well. I can't remember her name, but my high-school Spanish came in handy! She was so self-reliant! She had four kids and she went to work during in the lettuce fields in the season. She taught me how to eat chorizo which was delicious. We had a lot in common and I liked her a lot.

One night we heard what sounded like a baby crying up on the roof. The next morning we found big paw prints in the sand back of the apartment where I hung our clothes out to dry on the clotheslines. We learned later that it was a panther! Another time I was ironing Jill's little dresses and went to hang them in her closet and found a black widow spider on one of her dresses! You had to be careful and shake out your shoes before you put them on.

This apartment complex was literally on the edge of the desert. When Jill and I drove down to Yuma from Phoenix back in 2010, we drove past the location of this apartment, but it was long gone, and I think there is a retirement complex there now. Our apartment was located in what is now a gazebo in their front yard. Yuma has expanded quite a long way westward from when we used to live here!

So, John found a better place for us to live that was closer for him to drive to the base.

(Home #10) It was located at 250 Catalina Drive, #W-3. It was just off the main drag and just across the street from a Walgreen's and some other stores that I could walk to. We paid $176.80 a month in rent including utilities.

So we moved here on New Year's Day 1970 and stayed until the end of April, 1971.

We had to buy some furniture so he went to a used furniture place and got us an orange vinyl jackknife sofa that made into a bed, and a tv and a chair and beds for us.

shortly after we moved in, i had a serious attack of sinusitis. i couldn't even stand up. john had to go to work so he put pillows on the floor in the living room and left food out for me and Jill that i could reach. it took me a couple of days to be able to function again after my sinuses got used to the new climate!

I loved that Walgreen's. they used to have lots of little canvas tennies for children for $2.00 in a wire basket. I bought them for Jill as she got bigger and bigger. they were all different colors and she looked so cute in them! the picture at the top was taken at Catalina Drive. I also got her several of those little "bubble" suits like she has on and little sun hats. she got so brown! one day, she was in our living room playing next to our sliding glass door, which was open, but i had the screen closed. She was laughing and I looked to see what she was doing and she indicated to me she wanted to go outside to play... but I noticed just in time that there was a Gila monster just outside the screen that had been making her laugh! you don't mess with Gila monsters. their jaw doesn't relax if they bite you even if you cut their head off!

another time, she was playing outside and fell against that palm tree. the fronts near the bottom where they have broken off are dried and rather sharp. she hit her forehead on the trunk and, of course, was bleeding like crazy! and i was freaking out! luckily, john had just come home and he knew what to do. i think she still has a scar on her forehead!

each apartment in our complex had its own storage closet next to the parking area. i got to know the manager of the complex. One time after a neighbor skipped out without paying their rent, he called me over to come look at their storage closet. It was full of bed linens and other stuff. he let me take whatever i wanted! we didn't have to buy sheets or towels for many years after that!

John made a really good friend, Jimmy Massad, in basic training. They were both sent to Tennessee for school, and they both got stationed at Yuma, so Jimmy spent a lot of time at our house. He would sleep on our jackknife sofa just about every weekend and eat with us. But he never brought any food with him and I remember being a little resentful that he was eating our groceries! But he was John's friend, and one didn't deny a guest. he liked my frosted cupcakes and my brownies.

John had several part-time jobs to make extra money. One was at the local golf course where he would dive into the ponds to retrieve golf balls. he would bring them home and we would wash them. he got so much money for each ball he turned in.

Another job was working at Der Weinerschnitzel, a fast food place that only served hot dogs and brats. he had the night shift. he said that occasionally, a woman would come through the drive-thru with no clothes on! of course the guys liked that a lot. and if a customer was rude or hard to please, they would spit in their hot dog!

John had other friends that he made on-base that he spent time with. we lived next door to a Holiday Inn and they would come over and we would sneak across the back and slip inside to use the pool.

So with some extra money in the bank, John brought home some new furniture for me. I didn't get to pick it out, but he did pretty well. A Lane California King-sized bedroom set with two nightstands and a triple dresser and two mirrors, a black vinyl button-tufted living room set consisting of a sofa, love seat, and a gold fabric matching recliner in Italian Provincial, a dark wood credenza, end tables, lamps, a stereo system, a huge mirror with an ornate gold frame, and a huge wall hanging of a knight in gold armor on his golden horse on a black wood background made of fiberglass. whew! i was overwhelmed!

At some point, John bought a 350 Honda motorcycle. He and his friends would go riding through the miles and miles of orange groves that were just outside town. I can't remember that he ever asked me to ride with him! I think that was because there was no one to watch Jill, I guess.

I wanted to contribute to the household, so I got a job at One-Hour Martinizing which was a dry cleaner located just across the street next to Walgreen's. I only worked there for about a month. I was offered a better job working at Melody Cleaners which was about 3 miles north of us just off the main drag. I worked there about six weeks, I think it was. I can't remember why I quit. I had been leaving Jill in Child Care on the base. I'm thinking the reason I quit was that I couldn't stand being away from her.

We used to go to the drive-in movies. One that we saw was "Paint Your Wagon". one time one of John's friends from base named Jack Kellam and his girlfriend came with us. we had a Ford pickup and john backed it into the space so we could sit in the truck bed.

we had blankets and pillows. so john and i and Jill are sitting on the tailgate and jack and his g/f are further back in the truck bed when we could feel the truck start to rock. I looked at john and he looked at me and we knew what was going on back there, but didn't know what to say! so we just watched the rest of the movie and went home. after that, i told john that i wouldn't go if jack wanted to go with us.

later on, this same Jack got John to loan him money to buy his girlfriend a diamond engagement ring!!! when i found out, it made me mad because we didn't have money to lend! as time wore on with no money being paid back to us, i told john he should get our money back from this guy. he came home with an oil painting of some roses that this jack had painted. and that's all we ever got out of him, the stinker!

I used to launder and starch and iron John's green uniforms that he had to wear every day to work. it took a lot of starch to make them stiff as a board! for the short time i worked at the dry cleaners, i got all our laundry done for free! but that was only for a short time until i quit.

One time, when the manager of Der Weinerschnitzel's house burned, he wanted to sell it to us, cheap. we've often thought we should have bought it!

Another time, someone wanted to pay John to go to Mexico to some mountaintop to retrieve some gold. after much thought and deliberation, we decided he'd best stay in the States! it probably wouldn't have panned out anyway, or he could have been killed!

And then, another time, John's buddies told us about the grunion run at El Golfo de Santa Clara, Sonora, Mexico. They told us we needed to come to see it! so we packed up some coolers with food and drink and took our swimsuits and headed to the border. it was a trip of about 90 miles. we did some shopping in San Luis. I bought a rough jewelry chest and a black wrought iron candle sconce for my wall.

Then we drove on down to Sonora and went down on the beach to swim until nightfall when the grunion started to come up on the beach. it was amazing to see! hundreds and thousands of small silvery fish trying to get up on the beach to lay and fertilize their eggs in the sand. you could just scoop them up with your hands and toss them into whatever containers you'd brought with you. Jill and i decided to just watch. it was quite a day!

John wanted us to have a pool so we moved to our Home #11 located at 2727 Arizona Ave. Apt.#9. It was a 2-bdrm. ground floor apt. with an enclosed patio that we paid $182 a month including utilities. But we only stayed here for six weeks. I don't even remember ever swimming in the pool or even being entirely unpacked because John got his Westpak orders for Japan. He would be shipping out mid-July (1971) and we had to get me and Jill moved back home to Buffalo Center so I could be close to all of our folks.

Luckily, since John made Sergeant, his moving costs to move us and all our furniture up to Buffalo Center was covered by the military. So we watched as the moving company came and packed up all our clothes and all our possessions including ashtrays with the ashes still in them into the big moving van.

We made arrangements with john's friend Jimmy to drive our motorcycle home for us since his home was in North Dakota. So we loaded up our new 1971 light blue VW bug and headed for Iowa, hoping to get there before the moving van did!