The year was 1949 and it was midsummer. I’m sure about the season because I wasn’t smelling eraser dust in a humid, crowded school room. In the fall I would start the sixth grade in yet another new school. I was eleven years old.

     I wasn’t bothered being the new kid on the playground. By late July, 1949, I was used to it. For the first nine years of my life we moved around the country. My dad was a structural steel worker and our family followed the work: a bridge in one city, a skyscraper in another, at times it was a dam on a river and then there were the secret jobs on military bases. We traveled with a canvas bag of water dangling from the hood ornament. Our home jerked and swayed behind us, clamped to the back of our automobile.

     The vehicle I remember well is a 1941 Chevrolet. It was a powerful overhead six with a stick shift and four doors. In that car I could stretch out in the backseat. As we drove city to city, I would lose myself in the hundred or so comic books my mom and dad purchased for five and ten cents a shot. There was method to their madness. Those nickels and dimes bought peace and quiet during the long tedious hours of car travel. 

     There were times, a big job in one city or another, when we got to live in a real house. This was a big treat because the trailer we lugged along was so tiny. If I passed gas in my bed at the nose, it woke my mom and dad in their double bed at the tail end. The word togetherness was no doubt coined by those who experienced similar living conditions. 

     Nineteen forty two found dad working a job at an air force base near Provo, Utah. When the contractor handed out pink slips, we moved on to California. Traveling the east and Midwest during the war years, my parents heard stories about The Golden State. Work was supposed to be plentiful there and so it was. In September, 1942, dad took a job in Los Angeles. The project, the union said, would last through the winter and into the spring of 1943.

     Mom and dad rented a four room cabin in Willowbrook, California. The plan was to test and savor West Coast living. Against my will, I was enrolled in Kindergarten classes. I was shy of five years old, but the school agreed to take me. My screams and sobs were treated as part of the Kindergarten curriculum vitae

     Mom and dad were partial to the climate of California, but the job in LA dried up. Hot, mesquite flavored winds promised more than union assurances of work to come. The buzz of tires on asphalt, softened by a hot Mojave sun, pulled my folks eastward.

     My parent’s roots, family and friends, remained in rural mid America. Small town life amid the bluffs of the Mississippi Valley was nurtured by miles of corn, wheat and oat fields. The river towns of Guttenberg, Iowa and La Crosse, Wisconsin called mom and dad home. 

     We followed the river up to La Crosse in the summer of 1943. My grandmother had taken ill and my mother’s sister was caring for her. I remember my grandma only as a vague presence. Her illness grew worse after our arrival and she went into the hospital. My mother’s mother died shortly after. Mom learned grandma willed the family home in Guttenberg to her. The windfall came as a complete surprise.

     My grandma’s house was a big two story affair with a sun porch on three sides. It had a root cellar basement consisting of a dirt floor and walls shored up with rock. The house was built on two acres of land next to the railroad tracks.

     Dad tried his hand at being a townie. He worked at small construction projects for neighboring farmers and picked up periodic work in town. Most often he traveled the river, signing on for bridge repairs and updates on river dams.

     In his spare time he worked on the old homestead. When the house was built, in the early eighteen hundreds, rebar didn’t exist. I don’t know the details of his construction techniques, but he reinforced the basement walls. I do remember a couple of neighbor men helping him carry out a lot of rock. After that dad mixed concrete by hand and shoveled it down the old coal chute.

     I wasn’t allowed near the basement while he completed the work. I do remember the first time I went down there with my mom...boy was I disappointed. Those wonderful musty, dirt smells and the damp cold, great for hot summer days, had vanished. All the cobwebs and potato bugs...gone. Now, the smell of concrete burned my nose. I couldn’t find any water seeping onto the floor. This fact alone ruined the basement for puddle jumping and mud making. My cellar had lost all its magic.

     Dad’s next project was indoor plumbing. Mom made him promise running water and indoor toilets before Old Man Winter shook his snowy coat. Dad tried to meet the deadline, but bitter weather arrived hard and fast. I wasn’t quite six, but I can remember chamber pots and trips to the outhouse in the morning to empty them. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent one Iowa winter with only an outhouse for your personal relief.

     From 1943 until the fall of 1946 Guttenberg was our home. Hot, humid summers and winters only an Iowan, indoor plumbing or no, can appreciate, was enough for mom and dad. We moved west and settled in Downey, California. My parents were tired of roaming the country. Life on the road, living with the snow, rain, tornados and broiling heat of the east, Midwest and south was no longer necessary. Growth begot construction and Southern California was the place to hang your hat and purse.

     Nineteen forty seven saw the GI’s of World War II flooding the Golden State. New housing was in demand. Many former GI’s were taking an education and starting new businesses, all on the GI Bill. The influx of people brought eastern based insurance companies, banks, commercial construction companies, oil and gas producers and many other major corporations. Big business needed offices and manufacturing facilities. Oil companies contracted

for refineries and warehouses. Big business meant big buildings and big buildings started with massive steel skeletons.

     Dad had all the jobs he wanted. He helped erect the high-rise buildings of Wilshire Boulevard. In Long Beach and San Pedro, he took jobs constructing refineries and bridges. Along the Pacific Coast and into the desert he worked on secret military projects. Later in the 1950s he was part of the crew producing the Sky-Ride, Matterhorn and other attractions at Disneyland.

     Between four thirty and five each afternoon dad would pull into the driveway of our rented two bedroom home in Downey. There would be a kiss for mom, two quick highballs and a quicker evening meal. After supper, I would run outside and help load the car with tools. With me beside him on the big bench seat, dad would point the nose of our 1941 Chevy toward Compton. Every night, and weekends, he fashioned a two bedroom home with detached two car garage. The half acre lot on McMillan Street would be our slice of American Pie.

     I helped...I realized after a few years, he made me think I helped. Dad built the house with a five thousand dollar loan and his bare hands. He didn’t have an extra nickel to spend for labor or power tools. I will remember 1949 until my toes turn up. It marked a number of firsts for me. Our first real home was number one. I remember how grand and huge it looked. There was a goosebumpy, fresh smell, thrill moving into our new home. I still wonder how dad felt when he drove his last nail. I still wonder if his heart jumped in his chest when he carried the first piece of furniture through the front door. He performed a miracle for his family. He must have felt the magic. 

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