Evanston: 50 years
Evanston: 50 years
An In Focus gallery at THE ATLANTIC caused me to realize that I graduated from college fifty years ago this year, and that had my first wife and I remained married to one another, we would have celebrated our golden wedding anniversary last December. We fell only 46 years short.
We were married at the beginning of the Christmas break our senior year in college and lived on the savings from my life guard jobs in the summers at an outdoor pool in a Saint Louis suburb and during the winters on Saturdays at a YMCA indoor pool. At both I made the minimum wage of $1.25 an hour and got time and a half for overtime when I worked more than 40 hours a week at the outdoor pool. Overtime was big.
Our budget was $150 a month, of which we paid $67.50 rent for the second floor of a house near campus. $30 a month went for food. And I don’t recall on what we squandered the other $52.50.
While more important events took place in the world that year, it was a decisive year in my life, more for what happened the day after graduation than graduation itself. We started driving west in my first car, a 1955 Chevy station wagon I bought used for $450, towing a U-Haul trailer filled with our worldly possessions. Oddly I might have had more then than now.
We were heading for San Diego, as I am again in two weeks--the more things change... I had not seen the sea for five years, not since I spent the summer of 1958 with my grandparents in Mission Beach. I was free of my mother and stepfather and getting free of the land. Or at least to its edge. It took me eleven more years actually to get free of the land.
The drive took us four days.
We spent the first night in Wichita, Kansas. The second in Vaughn, New Mexico. The third in Gila Bend, Arizona.
I still recall as we neared Mission Beach, first the smell and then that first glimpse of ocean again.
Monday, February 18, 2013