Houston, Texas 1971
Photo taken at employment
application to H.P.D.
I was 19 years old, almost 20, single and still living at home with my mom.
I didn’t have a job nor any experience to speak of to put on a job application.
Without a reliable vehicle, public transportation didn’t extend out to where we lived, making finding a job difficult — and I wanted a job where I could gain experience for the future.
College hadn’t worked out, partially because of the transportation issue.
1972 was going to start out very, very different.
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Hi Mike .. what happened next .. I await 2012 .. cheers … tough beginnings …
Happy New Year to you and Karen .. cheers Hilary
I’ll be posting more about what happened next later today. I can say, though, that the new year of 1972 started out in a totally different state than Texas.
Happy New Year!!!
OOPS! My comment here seems to have vanished into your spam box!
I checked my spam box and didn’t find it there. (strange)
Let me try and re-write the comment without losing the substance.
I became a father in 1971. I had flown a number of times before that but for my 15 day old son, his first flight as a babe in arms was from his maternal home town to Mumbai where I was posted then. I had borrowed a friend’s car to receive both mother and son in the height of Mumbai’s monsoon. Will never forget the sight of the two of them disembarking last from the plane and being escorted by airline crew under a huge umbrella. They had to walk on the tarmac to the arrival hall where I was waiting. Simpler days with little of the security nonsense that we have now.
I too did not have a car then and was dependent on public transport. Two years later however I got kicked upstairs and not only had a car for my exclusive use, but was given a company chauffeur to drive me around too.
Forty years down the line, I have a car that I seldom use and rely on the ubiquitous autorickshaw or be driven around by my son or a chauffeur paid on an hourly basis!
Things were a lot simpler back then.
While I was nearing the end of a school at the Mare Island Navy Base, our oldest daughter was born in ’73 at Travis Air Force Base in California, at the same base hospital where POWs released from North Viet Nam were being treated. A couple of weeks later, we were on our way to my next school in Idaho. On the way there, about 20 miles outside Salt Lake City, the clutch went out on our car. The tow truck driver dropped us off at a motel in Salt Lake and then took our car to a shop to get it fixed. We used the bottom drawer from a dresser for a bed for our little girl.
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