After the Honeymoon; Starting a new life in the West

As if a whirlwind wedding wasn’t enough, my parents also had a whirlwind honeymoon; four days to be exact. They spent those four days split between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, staying with family friends. In the February following their wedding my father began work as a junior accountant with the National City Bank of New York.

I remember my father’s disappointment with me when I refused to go to university at the end of high school and his disappointment only deepened when I frequently changed jobs, searching for something which would satisfy me. But, as they say, the chip does not fall far from the wood. My father also changed jobs frequently. I also remember him telling me that, in one of his jobs, he had an office which overlooked the harbour. He became so envious of the people leaving on ships that he resigned from the company with the intention of travelling.

Could his job at the bank have been the one that made him want to travel? The building he worked in was not far from the piers of New York, so it is possible. So possible that by early September of the same year he had resigned from the bank and took off to explore America with my mother.

One story my father told me was that, when they packed the car to leave on their adventure, my mother insisted on taking her sewing machine. It was not the slimline versions you can find nowadays – it was a Singer sewing machine complete with table. He tried his best to dissuade her. Somehow they managed to fit it in the car.

Over the next eighteen days my parents, according to my father’s notes, travelled through sixteen states. They took many photographs – mostly of the scenery. A couple of the photos indicate they stopped in New Mexico and there are postcards which show scenes of Louisiana. Someday I will have to sort and cull those photographs. I wonder how much they saw in such a short time. There is no record, apart from the untitled photographs, of where they went or where they stayed or what their thoughts were.

By the end of September my parents had decided to settle in Colorado Springs. By the beginning of October my father had found a position as an accountant with Aircraft Mechanics.

They stayed in Colorado Springs for two years. In that time my grandparents had also relocated there and then moved back east, my parents had started and discontinued their own business, and had moved residence a couple of times.

In the same photo album which holds the photos of their trip to the west, is a cutting of a newspaper article (see above). There is no mention of the newspaper it was taken from or the date it was published but, from the by-line and the contents, I am assuming it was The Denver Post, sometime before Christmas 1951. I only wish my mother hadn’t glued the article to the album!