Beautiful Boca Raton: Our Base of Operations

Our transfer to Boca Raton was a very lucky break for the whole family. Being so close to a beautiful beach was a great thrill for all of us and there were many other advantages. One that Mina often mentioned was its relative proximity and accessibility to her homeland, Costa Rica. In the ensuing years she and I, and sometimes our children, were able to enjoy visits with her extensive family in San José. We were even able to travel in the company of our kids, Jack and Rosie, to visit Parrita and Quepos, where I had worked for the United Fruit Company, and romanced my wife. There was one occasion when Mina's huge extended family organized a tremendous party for us, for which they rented a large hall containing a dance floor and dozens of tables for participants. I can only estimate that there were at least 100 relatives, including entire families with lots of kids, taking part. Wow, what a party! I'll have to leave it up to your imagination to picture it.

We also had a lot of family on the West Coast that we needed to keep in touch with. Shortly after getting settled in our new house, I was able to arrange for my dad and mother to visit us, around the holiday season (Christmas and New Years). I know it was a great experience for them. In subsequent years, after my dad passed away in 1980, we were able to have my mother visit us a couple of times.

Mina also had family on the West Coast, nieces and nephews who had settled in Point Roberts and Canada as a result their connections with us. That is another story: briefly, it all started with our meeting an American on a ship traveling from Costa Rica, where we were all returning from vacation. Later, the following year, he made another trip to Costa Rica with a letter of introduction from Mina to members of her family. As a result he met and became enamoured with Mina's niece, Adela. This eventually resulted in her coming to the United States, getting married to the American, John Neill, and settling in Point Roberts. Later on she was followed by a brother who also settled in Point Roberts and a sister who married a Canadian and settled in Canada, just across the border.

Up to the time of writing this autobiography we have continued to live in the same house in Boca Raton, a total of 36 years. Our kids have grown up, developed their own lives and families, gotten educated and scattered out to different places before settling in their present locations. Our extended family has grown to a total of 32 descendants: 4 children,16 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren. In the course of our lives, keeping in touch with our offspring has required a great deal of traveling to such places as Provo, Salt Lake City, Guadalajara, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Winter Haven, Miami, and even Korea. In addition to these travels, there were trips to the Northwest to attend family reunions with my parents, brothers and sisters, and their families.

All of this activity is too complex for me to deal with in a short biography. For this reason, I propose to split the remainder of this essay into four sections—one for each of my four kids. In a few paragraphs, I will attempt to summarize major events in each of their lives. I hope that I can find time and energy to do a satisfactory job of this.

Getting Started in Boca Raton

The arrangements for my tranfer included airfare for the entire family and shipment of our Dodge station wagon and all of our household belongings. We were provided subsidized lodging in a comfortable apartment close to the beach for the first nine months after our arrival. That was the time that it took for us to find a suitable neighborhood and complete the construction of a new house. The area was close to good schools, including grade school for Jack Junior and Rosie, and a high school where Joan became enrolled.

Janet had graduated from highschool in San José so was ready for college. Our solution to this problem was to purchase a new VW bug (cost: $1500) so she could enroll in a junior college located in another town some distance from Boca Raton. After changing schools a couple of times, including some time spent attending a school in Costa Rica, we eventually got her enrolled in BYU, where she met her future husband. Joan attended Boca Raton High School three years, where she graduated prior to becoming enrolled in BYU. Like Janet, she eventually captured a husband at BYU (obtaining her Mrs degree).

After going through an incalculable number of mental gyrations trying to sort out the huge number of experiences of our family since settling in Boca Raton, where Mina and I have lived since May 1969 in the company of varying numbers of our children and grandchildren, I have hit upon a plan for organizing much of the most interesting information. I realize that I am not going to be able to produce any kind of a literary masterpiece, and because of energy and time constraints I will have to limit the length of the document. What I hope to accomplish is to dedicate a page or two to each of the members of our immediate family, including first of all my wife, Mina, and me as the progenitors of our clan, followed in turn by each of our children.

Career Development and Education with IBM in San José

Soon after starting on my new job I began to think about what I could do to improve my prospects for promotion. San José State College was easily reached from where we lived, and as soon as I could meet the requirements, I enrolled as a graduate student. One of the requirements was to achieve satisfactory scores in a Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Like Boeing, IBM encouraged its engineers to continue their education and provided payment of tuition for courses completed. In this way I completed a couple of courses towards a Masters degree by attending evening classes.

Then came a lucky break. IBM initiated a “resident study” program for engineers which provided those who qualified with tuition and expenses for full-time attendance at a selected college or university with the objective of an advanced degree (doctorate or masters). I applied and was accepted for the masters degree program, after being interviewed by a number of top department heads. I chose to attend Stanford University, located in Palo Alto. I worked out a class schedule so that I only had to make the trip from home to Palo Alto three times a week. I still had my Pontiac, acquired in Seattle, and luckily it held up OK. I managed to graduate with a Masters degree (MSEE) in June 1963. I was 40 years old.

After getting the MSEE I worked on a lot of different development projects, which I am unable to describe in such a short essay. I was involved in the design of products using the first large-scale- integration chips and I had to learn high-level computer languages, such as FORTRAN in the solution of design problems. I managed to get my name on a number of patents and invention disclosures. I advanced from Design Engineer through Associate, Senior Associate to Staff Engineer, which is two levels below the top engineering title of Senior Engineer. In 1968 I was offered the opportunity of a transfer to a new group that had been established a year before in Boca Raton, Florida.
Moving to Florida was not an easy decision to make. Living in San José had a lot of advantages. While we were there we did a lot of traveling during vacations, up and down the coast from Canada to San Diego. We were in a convenient location for visits by my parents, brothers and sisters and many relatives living in California, Oregon, Washington and even Canada. Mina had a number of nieces and nephews, who had settled in Point Roberts, Washington and Canada, which would be the basis for a long story in itself. I had cousins and a couple of uncles living in California and many close relatives, including brothers and sisters in Oregon and Washington. During vacations we attended family reunions in Washington, visited Disney Land and the San Diego Zoo, and made excursions into Canada, with Mina’s relatives.

However, there appeared to be a lot of advantages in moving to Boca Raton. The department I would be going into was headed by a Phd, Tom Harrison, who had also obtained his degree through the IBM resident study program, and had to his credit a couple of books on Process Control Computers. The name of the department was Advanced Technology in the General Systems Division. Most of the nine or ten engineers in the department had Phd degrees. One other engineer beside myself had a Master's degree. So you might say it was a fairly high-power department. I started out in the department with the title of Staff Engineer, which was four levels above Junior Engineer, and within seven years advanced to the top level of Senior Engineer after a number of years as Advisory Engineer.

For many reasons, including faulty memory and complexity of the subject, I cannot describe the many projects I was involved in during my career as an engineer. Suffice it to mention that I made some small contribution to the development of the IBM Personal Computer (PC), which evolved in Boca Raton. Of much more interest to my readers, I am sure, will be the development of my family, resulting in a huge number of descendants, including at the present time (I think) 12 great grandchildren.

A New Job and a Great Opportunity with IBM

As a result of my BSEE, Boeing almost immediately promoted me to a position as design engineer, and gave me what seemed like a hefty raise (to $605/mo). In December 1959 I bought my first car, a 1954 Pontiac, from another employee. I was 36 years old and had never learned to drive. I was given a few lessons by a friend, the bishop of a neighborhood Mormon church, and refined my skills by practicing on my own. After one failed try, I succeeded in passing the driving test. When I applied for automobile insurance, the agent was suspicious and asked me to explain why it was the first time I had ever applied for automobile insurance.

New Year’s Day of 1960 is a memorable date, as it was the occasion for a resolution which affected the rest of my life. I resolved to quit smoking. I had never been a heavy smoker, but I had started while working in an office in New York and continued throughout the time I spent with the United Fruit Company, smoking Costa Rican and Ecuadorean brands, which were quite inexpensive.
Sometime in January I noticed an ad by IBM offering employment in San José, California. I wasn’t very excited about it because I wasn’t unhappy with the job I had in Seattle, but I decided, anyway to go for an interview. The recruiter presented an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I continued to work for Boeing until March 1, when I started as Design Engineer with IBM in San José with a monthly salary of $675. I had to leave the family in Seattle for three months, while I worked out the details of finding a place for them in San José. Before leaving Seattle, Janet finished the fourth grade and Joan finished first grade. In the meantime, I found a nice place in a brand new housing development, called Dutch Haven, where the new houses were built to have a distinctive Dutch style appearance. By the time I sent for the family in June, I had purchased all of the essential furnishings: beds, refrigerator, washing machine, table and chairs, etc., etc. Because of the GI Bill, which I qualified for as a WW2 veteran, I was able to finance the purchase of the house and a lot, with no down payment. The total purchase price was $16,500, which my veteran status allowed me to finance with a 4% loan and no down payment.

Another nice feature of the home in Dutch Haven was that it was located in a quiet neighborhood less than a block from a nice grade school, where Janet, Joan, and eventually Jackie and another daughter, Rosie, attended school. We lived there for a total of eight years, until 1968. Our third daughter, Rose Marie, was born in a hospital in San José on June 17, 1961. She was a birthday present for Mina, whose birthday is also on June 17.

Getting a Start in Engineering

After accepting a job with Boeing, I left my family with my parents while I got started on my new job and looked for a place for them to live. I eventually found a motel within walking distance of the plant where I was working. My job was in a department involved in the development of the Bomarc missile. It was a pretty large and powerful weapon. I do not know whether it was designed for attack or defense. All I know was that we were entering into the “cold war” and there was a tremendous demand for engineers, which explains why it was so easy for me to get a job in engineering, with such limited experience. I started out with a salary of about $400 a month.

Within a couple of months I was able to get Mina and the kids moved into the motel I had rented.. Janet had become very attached to her teacher and the first grade class in Portland and cried when she found out she would be moving. However, we soon adjusted to the new situation. We even had a small TV (B&W) which we set on top of the refrigerator. We only had one room which served as bedroom, dining room and kitchen.

A nice thing about the job with Boeing, was that the Company encouraged its engineering employees to get additional education, by paying tuition and allowing time off during working hours to attend classes at the University of Washington. Within a year we were able to move into a nice apartment near the university and carpooling made it possible for me to get to work. I was also able to take night classes on campus, which was within easy walking distance. I was thus able to get along for a couple of years without owning a car.

Working and attending school part time, it took me about three years to complete the requirements for a BSEE (Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering). My degree was dated August 21, 1959. This was two months and 14 days after Jack, Jr. was born. I was studying feverishly for final exams the day that Mina’s water broke and she had to be rushed to the hospital. I was extremely happy when it was announced that she had given birth to a boy. The date was June 7. Mina insisted that we name him Jack Leo in honor of his father for whom she obviously had great admiration.

Getting Started in a New Life

My first challenge, apart from getting Janet started in school, was to find employment. I figured that with the type of education and experience I had had, I was best suited for a job in accounting or some type of business administration. I started out with a job in the credit department of a Sears Roebuck store in a junior management position, at $305 a month. For various reasons, I did not turn out to be a satisfactory credit manager and my boss suggested that it would be appropriate for me to resign, which I did. I had worked a total of three months. By this time I had moved the family into an apartment located not far from the store, so I could walk to work.

I started looking for another job. I applied for a position with a CPA firm but failed to get a response, so I responded to an add in the Portland Oregonian by Boeing Aircraft offering a variety of positions in engineering. I looked up the Boeing recruiter located in an office in Portland and succeeded in getting a position as Engineering Aide, based on my college grades in math, physics and engineering courses I had completed in the Navy. Shortly after I had accepted a position with Boeing in Seattle, I got a call from the CPA firm, telling me that they were very interested in my qualifications and regretted that they had not called sooner. By this time I had worked up a lot of enthusiasm for the prospect of getting into engineering. I have often thought about how close I came to embarking on a career in public accounting. I am thankful that I was able to get into engineering, which led to such great opportunities with IBM.

Life in Equador

In Tenguel we occupied a house next door to that of the “Superintendent of Agriculture,” as he was referred to. He was in charge of all of the agricultural operations, including banana and cacao plantations. However, I reported to the Chief Accountant, located in Guayaquil. Transportation between Tenguel and Guayaquil for administrative employees like myself was by a small Beechcraft airplane. Agricultural products were transported by barge on the Guayas River to the port in Guayaquil to be loaded on one of the ships of the “Great White Fleet” for shipment to the U.S. or Europe.

Not long after we got settled in Tenguel, Mina became “with child” again. By this time, Janet was a little more than two years old. When the time for delivery approached, we decided that it would be best for Mina to take a trip to San José, C.R., to be among members of her family when the blessed event occurred. Five or six weeks before the expected date, Mina and Janet went by air to San José to be with her older sister, Rosa, who had always been like a mother to her after her own mother had died when she was between five and six years old. I knew she would be well cared for among her many loving brothers and sisters. When the news reached me in Tenguel that a baby girl had been born, I immediately arranged to join Mina. The date of birth was May 7, 1953. I was almost 30 years old. By this time I had earned more than a month of vacation time, which I made good use of. The new baby was named Joan Patricia. When I first saw her I was amazed how much long black hair she had. It looked beautiful. She had obviously taken after her mother.

After a delightful month of vacation among Mina’s relatives we returned with the new baby to Tenguel, where I had a lot of work to do. If I had time, I could write a book about Tenguel. My job consisted of office work, auditing payroll records, as well the duties of Division Inspector, which required me to ride through banana and cacao plantations on a mule, accompanied by a farm overseer and a foreman. For entertainment, there were occasional dances in the club house and a lot of poker games. I became adept at poker. I once kept track for a year, and found that I had come out about $500 ahead. That was a lot because my monthly salary was only a little over $300 (apart from fringe benefits). Needless to mention, Mina was not very happy with my card playing addiction, because it often kept me out late.

After two years in Tenguel, I believed that if I were going to make any progress in my line of work, which was accounting, I needed a different kind of experience, so I petitioned my boss in Guayaquil to transfer me to the main office, located there. As a result, my family and I were provided with an apartment on the second floor of an apartment building located within a short walking distance from the office. As was the Latin custom, I was allowed two hours at noon to go for lunch and a siesta.

During the two years that we lived in Guayaquil, Janet grew from about four to six, and Joan was three years younger, so by the time we left in 1956, she was three years old. I enjoyed taking the two little girls out for walks along the streets of Guayaquil, and occasionally we would go to a movie. I remember a cricket plague, at one time, when you could not walk along the street without stepping on crickets.

After awhile with this kind of life, I began to worry about the future and the complications of raising a family in a foreign country. I did not like the prospect of sending my kids away to boarding schools in the States, as was the practice among other American executive or administrative personnel, so one day, without consulting anyone, including my wife, I decided to make a break. I dropped a letter of resignation on my boss’s desk. He was a nice guy and sympathized with me, but when I told Mina, I think she went into a state of shock. I would be returning to the States, with no job, a family to support, and an uncertain future. However, I had quite a bit of confidence in myself.

I must admit that I felt some apprehension about making such a leap into the unknown, but I had a loving family: father, mother, brothers and sisters ready and happy to receive us, and I was on very good terms with my employer, La Compañía Bananera del Ecuador (subsidiary of the United Fruit Company), so I did not have any trouble in making our move. We were provided free transportation to Seattle on a UFCO ship. Upon our arrival we moved in with my parents who at the time were living in a small house in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, not far from the Columbia river. It was crowded, but by now my mother and dad were living alone and managed to make room for us all.

Janet was six years old. She had had some schooling in Guayaquil in a bilingual kindergarten conducted by a German lady, who taught the kids in both English and Spanish. Consequently, Janet had some knowledge of English; however, it must have been a little hard for her to adjust when we started her in the first grade, in a class where no Spanish was spoken. Joan was three years old, knew no English, but was a chatterbox in Spanish. Within a year she was fluent in English and refused to talk Spanish.

Romance in Costa Rica

My first job in Golfito was in the accounting department where I was assigned to a group having responsibility for IBM punched card accounting machines, which in those days (1948) were the forerunners of computers, used to prepare payroll and other accounting records. The manager of the department was an American, but all of the other employees were natives. As an American with a fairly fluent knowledge of Spanish, I was being trained for an administrative position in the Company. However, before I had progressed very far in that department, the chief accountant, Mr. Spiller, decided that he needed someone with my capabilities to be sent to Quepos, as Division Inspector to audit the farm payrolls. Quepos and Golfito were, both, agricultural enterprises organized as divisions, the primary product of which was bananas. A division was subdivided into farms or plantations, each with an overseer, timekeeper, a foreman, and two or three dozen laborers.

My responsibility was to insure that reliable payroll records were maintained on each of the farms. In order to carry out this responsibility I was provided with a motor car and a chauffeur, referred to as a motor boy. All travel between the farms and division headquarters was made possible by a single-line railroad, over which harvested bananas were hauled to the loading docks for shipment. My motor car consisted of a single-seated vehicle, in which I sat next to the motor boy, with wheels designed for rail travel. The engine was a two-cylinder, putt-putt type, which was started by the motor boy running alongside and pushing, until the engine fired. This leads up to how I met my wife-to-be.
About fourteen miles northwest of Quepos, located on the same railway that provided transportation for the entire Quepos division with with all of its widely distributed farms or plantations, was the small community or village of Parrita. Parrita was located next to a small airport, providing passenger service to San José. On my travels throughout the division in my motor car, for the purpose of performing the duties of Division Inspector, I quite often had to pass through Parrita. Alongside the railway were various places of business, such as bars (cantinas), grocery shops, a cheap hotel, a restaurant and movie theater.
One day an acquaintance, Tom Forcum, a tropical tramp, Wallace Berry type, who had lived quite a few years in the area, as well as in San José, told me if I wanted to meet a nice girl, he knew a lot of them, as well as their families. There was one in particular, whom I had noticed during my travels in the vicinity of Parrita, who had struck me as being quite pretty. He told me that he knew her and her entire family quite well. She was the sister of the proprietor of the restaurant and movie theater, Don Bautista (Tista) Quirós, a gentleman well known and highly respected in the community. Tom told me he would be happy to introduce me some time, whenever it was convenient. So one Sunday he and I took a trip to Parrita on the small passenger train that provided service out of Quepos. The young lady, Herminia (Mina) Quirós, received us graciously and responded to the introduction with a word I still remember, "Encantada (charmed)."

From this point on, as can be easily understood, I made frequent stops in Parrita and was always warmly received. The girl had obviously taken a liking to me and I thought she was quite nice. She would often insist on preparing me a lunch, or a breakfast of bacon and eggs. Her knowledge of English was nil, but by this time, my Spanish was quite fluent, so we got along very nicely. I learned a lot about her family. One of the farm overseers that I talked to about her told me she was “de buena familia,” and eventually I learned that a great grandfather had briefly served as president of Costa Rica during a time of crisis in the country’s history. There were other members of her family tree who had distinguished themselves as military figures and in politics. These details all came out in a pamphlet on Quirós genealogy authored by a grandfather of Mina.

I also learned that she had 17 brothers and sisters. Her father was at the present time married to his third wife, his two previous wives having passed away. There is a lot more that I could write about her, but this is my life story and I have to set some limits, or I’ll never finish. One of the conveniences in our relationship was that, besides helping in the restaurant, Mina worked as cashier on movie night in her brother’s theater. She would direct me to a choice seat in the theater, where she would join me after finishing the ticket sales. Naturally, there was no charge for this service.

To make what could be a long story short, after about five months we decided to get married. We were married by the mayor (alcalde) of San José in the city hall (alcaldía) in the presence of a substantial number of Mina’s brothers and sisters and other relatives. The date, to be long remembered, was January 10, 1949. After a short honeymoon I returned to Quepos to go back to work and apply for Company housing for my new wife and me. I could not accommodate her in the bachelor quarters, where I had been living. There was nothing immediately available in the town of Quepos, but within about a month, my boss in the accounting department arranged for us to occupy a house on one of the banana farms, a house that would ordinarily have been occupied by a timekeeper, overseer, or one of the other administrative personnel hired to supervise the farm. As with all company houses, it was completely furnished (furniture, kitchen appliances, utensils, etc.). Being located on a farm was not a great inconvenience, because we had my motor car for transportation and the motor boy was provided with lodging within a convenient distance, where he could be reached as needed.

It is possible that Mina was not totally satisfied with the situation, but she did not complain. We had a few neighbors and each farm headquarters had a small commissary where essential groceries could be purchased. The name of the farm was “La Mona.” We continued to live on La Mona until after our daughter Janet was born. Before that date, March 23, 1950, we had taken my first vacation to the United States.

On our first trip to the United States on vacation, Mina was about six months pregnant. That was quite an adventure. Owing to a labor strike on the West Coast, the United Fruit Company ship we had passage on was diverted through the Panama Canal to New Orleans. From there we traveled by Grey Hound bus across country to Chehalis, Washington, where my parents lived on the outskirts of town with what was left of their family. I believe this included Marianne (17 yrs), Arline (16), Pat (14) and Mickey (13). Rulon, who was 19, had joined the Air Force, and by this time Ruth and Clara had married and left home. I am sorry that I am unable to enter into details about their lives at this point. It was in December of 1949, so Ruth would have been almost 23 and Clara a couple of months less than 22. I do not remember the details of their marital relationships, occurring at this time.

I believe both Mina and the members of my family had fun communicating across the language barrier. While we were living in Costa Rica, Mina did not feel much incentive to learn or practice English, as everyone we associated with was fluent in Spanish. This was the first time she was forced to make a real effort to learn English. Over the years Mina has progressed quite well with her English. She is a different type of learner than her husband, which used to bother me. But I have found that she has an excellent memory and learns more from social interaction than from books, whereas I spend more time with books; and less with people.

Back at work in Quepos, I eventually persuaded my boss to take me off the job of Division Inspector and transfer me to a position in the accounting department. I felt well qualified for this position, having completed a correspondence course in accounting through International Correspondence Schools, in addition to having a degree in Economics. The new job made it possible for us to be provided with a fairly nice furnished home in Quepos, with lots of friendly neighbors.

While we were living in Quepos, we had a very nice social life. Mina invited a couple of her nieces, Grace and Letty, daughters of Tista Quirós to stay with us for a few weeks. In the meantime, I had developed a strong interest in chess and poker, and there were lots of friendly games. I taught Grace and Letty to play poker, and one night the two of them had a weird streak of beginner's luck. These two teenagers turned out to be the big winners, playing in partnership with each other, and have been addicted to gambling ever since.
While we were still in the Quepos area, I was transferred to a job as chief clerk in the office of the Superintendent of Agriculture, which required us to move to another location about halfway between Quepos and Parrita, called Damas. Each move was to a furnished house. There was no air-conditioning but the houses were built with good ventilation provided by large screens surrounding the living areas. Even though in the tropics, people got used to it and found it quite comfortable.

In 1951, at a time that was late summer in the US, we took my second vacation. Janet was about 18 months old. This time our ship traveled up the West Coast. Although it was what was referred to as a banana boat, it had comfortable staterooms for passengers, which were reserved primarily for Company employees taking vacation. The passengers, who were often non-employees, shared a dining room with the ship's officers. Our family stateroom had separate beds for Mina and me, and a large rollaway crib was provided for Janet. I mention this because Janet had such a good time standing up in her crib during a time when the ship was going through very bad weather and Mina and I were both extremely seasick.

Our ship docked in San Francisco to unload bananas before proceeding on to our final destination, Seattle, where we disembarked and took a bus to Longview, where the family was now living in an apartment. The apartment was so crowded, that I decided to help my parents to buy a house. My dad had found employment in the vicinity of Longview, and circumstances were such that it was convenient for them to sell their equity in the home in Chehalis, which could be put down on property in Longview. They were eventually able to move into what seemed like a very nice home on Ocean Beach highway in Longview.

After this vacation, about a year after returning to my job in Damas, there was a shake-up in the Company and a number of employees, including myself, were transferred to Ecuador. I was transferred to a banana plantation headquarters, named Tenguel. This location was subordinate to the main headquarters located in Guayaquil. The chief accountant for the Equador division was located in Guayaquil. I was assigned to the job of Accountant's Representative in Tenguel, and performed the duties of Division Inspector (auditor) as well as being in charge of a payroll office of about a dozen Equadorean employees.

Starting Life as a Civilian

Prior to my graduation, I had corresponded with an insurance company in New York City that had advertised that it was looking for a college graduate with knowledge of Spanish to train for a position in Latin America. I thought that I had good qualifications for the job, so I had applied for an interview, which of course would require me to make a trip to New York. I received what seemed to me to be a favorable reply, so I as soon as I could pack and arrange for a bus trip, I set out for New York. To make a long story short, when I got to New York and was given an interview, I flunked out. I guess I did not have the right kind of business polish. Anyway, looking back on the experience, I am glad I did not get the job. Eventually, as will be seen, things worked out much better for me.
I got a room with a nice Christian Science lady, who rented rooms in her apartment on West 84th Street to several bachelors, with kitchen privileges, so I could prepare meals for myself. It was not long before I landed a job with a small chemical-exporting firm, under the direction of the export manager, who hired me because of my Spanish, as well as other qualifications. I worked there about four months before quitting to look for something else. That was a little before Christmas and the notorious Christmas Eve snowfall (1947) during which 24 inches fell in one night.

The next job was a night job with the main office of the Chase Manhattan Bank, as a clerk typing routine forms. I viewed that as temporary to tide me over until I could land something better. It was not long before I saw an ad in a newspaper, advertising a position in Costa Rica. It turned out that the advertiser was the United Fruit Company.

For a long time, I had known about Costa Rica, which had a reputation for its pretty girls. I had no trouble getting a job. They were looking for qualified young men, willing to start as beginners in various administrative positions, including accounting, in one of their banana plantation headquarters. As soon as I could get a passport, and other arrangements could be made, I was given first-class accommodations on one of the Great White Fleet, the refrigerated ships used to transport bananas to Europe and the US.

The first place I landed was Golfito, one of the main company banana ports in Costa Rica. I was immediately put to work in the accounting department and provided with a nice room in the bachelor quarters. The pay was $150 per month and free lodging. Meals were $30 a month, deducted from my monthly salary. That seemed pretty good at the time, since there were few expenses. I was promised a 6-week vacation once a year, after the first 18 months, with totally free transportation to any port in the United States, including first-class passenger accommodations. It turned out that by the time I met the requirement for that first vacation, I already had a pregnant Costa Rican wife. But that is another story.

While docked in Callao, a port city near Lima, Peru, I was allowed a couple days of liberty to explore the sights of Lima. By this time, as a result of an avid interest in languages, which I had continued to study during highschool and sparetime in the Navy, I spoke enough Spanish to get by. I found a guide, a young fellow who was eager to show me around, for a reasonable price. One of the spots I particularly remember was a Cathedral, in which the bones of Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Perú, are preserved, in a magnificent crypt.

After leaving Perú, the ship went into dry dock in Panama for repairs. While there, I was sought out by the Chief Yeoman, the petty officer in charge the ship's personnel files, and asked if I would be interested in attending college in the States, the V-12 program, the same program I had applied for previously, while stationed in Panama. That application had been ignored, probably due a quota that was already filled. This time, it turns out that the Concord had a quota of two for the opportunity, and one more person with suitable qualifications was needed to meet the quota. I did not hesitate to answer affirmatively. What luck!
My application was supposed to be reviewed by a panel of officers, but I guess they were too busy. I never saw any indication of a review, and the Chief Yeoman took care of all the details. I was soon on an LST, a kind of a huge troop landing craft, headed for San Pedro, California. From there, I was provided rail transportation to Butte, Montana, where I was enrolled as a freshman in the Montana School of Mines. That was at the beginning of March 1944. The school year at that time was based on three terms of four months each. Each term was considered equivalent to a college semester, so there were three semesters to a year. It was June 6 of the first term that the entire student body was summoned to the assembly hall to be given the announcement that D-Day had begun. The rest is history.

After two terms in Montana, I was transferred to the University of Washington, in Seattle. I had a choice of continuing in V-12, completing a full course in electrical engineering or changing to NROTC, Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps. I guess at the time I was seduced by the glamour of the NROTC uniform, which was like that of a Naval Academy midshipman. As a V-12 student I would continue to wear the traditional sailor's uniform and it would take longer to complete the course. I guess I was eager to finish school and get into an officer's uniform. Looking back I do not think it was a particularly wise decision, but it worked out for the best.

I was in the first term of what would correspond to my junior year, when the Japanese surrendered. I happened to be in downtown Seattle, when the news broke. What excitement! There was a lot of kissing and hugging going on but I was too shy to get in on any of it; so I was just a very happy observer.
After that I lost my motivation to continue in the course I was following. I had no ambition to become an officer, but wanted to get out into civilian life as soon as possible, to continue my education along lines that were of more interest to me. I did not want to continue taking specialized Navy courses, like navigation and damage control. Instead, I was leaning toward the social sciences, like psychology, history, and economics. Due to bureaucratic problems, school administration could not release me immediately from the NROTC program. The only way to get out of the program was getting married, which was prohibited, or flunking out. Since I had no prospect of marriage, I decided to flunk out. I simply stopped turning in my assignments, and was soon on my way out. Since there was less than a year left on my enlistment, which I had extended for two years because of the war, I was sent over to the Bremerton naval yard, to serve out the remainder of my time.

While in Bremerton, I had an easy job as engineer (mechanic) on a yard ferry used to haul laborers and naval personnel from one location to another. I had a lot of spare time on my hands, which I took advantage of by enrolling in extension courses from the University of Washington. I completed two basic courses in economics and several advanced Spanish composition courses. I picked up quite a few credits this way. After being discharged on my birthday, June 10, 1946, five years from the time I had joined, I immediately enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Washington, for the summer quarter. Because of the credits I had acquired in the Navy V-12 and NROTC programs, plus credits from the extension courses in economics and Spanish, I was able to graduate in June 1947, exactly a year after my discharge from the navy. I was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics with the distinction of "Cum Laude." During the final quarter of the school year, I was also elected to become a member of the honor society, "Phi Beta Kappa."

Navy Career

In June of 1941, I joined the Navy. I was almost rejected because of my partially crippled right arm; a result of the accident my mother had before my birth. However, I managed to demonstrate to the Navy doctor in charge of examining recruits in Seattle that I was not handicapped, by walking on my hands across the room where new recruits were being given their final physicals in a totally undressed state.

From Seattle, I was sent to the naval base in San Diego, California, for six weeks of boot camp training. I had applied for Radio School after completing boot camp; as radio and electrical gadgets had been a primary interest of mine from the time I was in the sixth or seventh grade of school. I yearned to be a navy radioman. However, to my great disappointment, this was not to be. Even though I was scheduled together with a number of other trainees to attend the Radio School located in San Diego, we were called into the office of the commanding officer, one day, to inform the group of us that Radio School would not be available to us. The reason given was that, due to a bureaucratic mixup, a large detachment of recruits had been sent from Rhode Island and would be taking up the available space in the school. I was so disappointed I cried.

We were given the option of being transferred to Machinist School in Great Lakes, Illinois, or being shipped out immediately, as a deckhand to a ship in San Diego. Since future success in one's naval career seemed to depend to a considerable extent on having attended a special training school, I decided to accept the assignment to Machinist School, even though I had little interest and knew zilch about machinery, engines, motors, and such stuff.

After a month of basic machinist school education, I was transferred to Dearborn, Michigan to a location on the grounds of the Ford Motor Company. Here I completed six more months of machine- tool and Diesel engine training in facilities provided by the company. Part of this education was hands-on experience in repair shops, alongside seasoned Ford employees. On weekend liberty passes, I had the freedom to hitchhike or take a bus into Detroit in search of entertainment. On December 7 (1941) I heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on the car radio of a nice person, who had given me a ride. Note: hitchhiking was a very common practice for servicemen at that time.
That night was when I knew for sure that I was going to be involved in the War for the duration. If we had not been drawn into the war, I would have been eligible for discharge from the Navy on my 21st birthday, under the terms of what was called a "minority cruise." A minority cruise applied to recruits enlisting prior to their 21st birthday. I remember listening to President Roosevelt's famous "this day in infamy" speech on the radio.

After completing four months of Machinist School (including a month in Great Lakes) and three months of Diesel School, three of my buddies and I were sent to Boston, assigned to a new subchaser, that had just come out of drydock, where it had been built. Our first training was on short cruises out of Boston harbor. After about a month in Boston we headed south along the East Coast. Our first stop was New York City, where the entire crew got shore leave (not all at once) to enjoy the sights. That was a tremendous experience.
Resuming our southward trip along the coast, in the company of a convoy, we stopped for awhile in Norfolk, Virginia, where I was also allowed liberty to go ashore. Our next port of call was Key West, Florida, which for awhile became our base of operations. From there we made three or four trips on convoy duty to Port of Spain, Trinidad, and also spent some time in Guantánamo, Cuba. Later on, we operated between Guantánamo and Colón, Panama, about three convoy trips. Sometime near the end of 1942, I managed to get tranferred off the subchaser onto shore duty in Panama City, due to some personality conflicts between my immediate superior, a Chief Petty Officer, and me.

While in Panama, assigned to a machine shop on the base, I completed a self-study course in preparation for advancement to Machinist Mate 2nd Class. I also put in an application for admission to V-12, a naval officer-training program being provided by the Navy at selected colleges and universities in the States. However, before any action was taken on either promotion to MM 2nd Class, or acceptance in V-12, I was shipped out on an APc, headed for Brisbane, Australia. An APc is a small ship, with a wooden hull, and driven by a single, large Diesel engine, designed to transport up to 60 troops, and/or small amounts of cargo, between the many islands in the South Pacific. The crew consisted of about 12 men plus the captain and an engineering officer. Both officers were below the rank of Commander. Since a ship as small as this one is not capable of carrying enough fuel to travel any great distance, we travelled in a convoy, which included a tanker, or fueling ship.

The first port of arrival turned out to be Bora, Bora in the Society Islands. By the time we reached Bora Bora I was on bad terms with the engineering CPO, a non-commissioned officer and my immediate superior. He picked on me a lot, I believe because of my friendly relationship with the engineering officer, a young lieutenant, who was his immediate superior. The situation was so bad that I went to the captain and asked for a transfer. It was my good luck that there was young fellow, with about the same rating as mine, who had been in trouble, because of a minor escapade, and wanted badly to get away. As sometimes happens, a swap was arranged, and he took my place on the ship, while I got transferred to shore duty in lovely Bora Bora.

I spent five months in Bora Bora, living in a Navy encampment, consisting of specially designed dwellings called "Quansett" huts, with semi-circular metal roofs; interspersed among the natives, living in typical native, thatched-roof shacks. It was interesting. I managed to get a small book on Tahitian, and made an effort to learn the language. It is the Polynesian language spoken in all of the Society Islands, including Bora Bora. It is a melodious language, similar to Hawaiian. The alphabet consists of only 13 letters, five of which are vowels.
While there, I had a number of different jobs in line with my training as a Diesel mechanic, and performed so well that I was promoted to Machinist Mate 2nd Class, the rating I had sought while in Panama. Then one day a light cruiser, the USS Concord dropped anchor in harbor, and it wasn't long before I decided I had enough of Bora Bora and thought that it would be nice to have a job on a large ship for a change. I managed to find a way to go aboard the Concord and get an interview with chief engineering officer, a Warrant officer. It happened that because of a disastrous accident, the ship had lost a lot of highly qualified personnel, including 9 Chief Petty Officers, and additional 13 members of the crew, mostly engineering personnel.

I had a lot of the kind of qualifications that were needed, so no time was lost in arranging a transfer. I became a member of a small group responsible for lifeboat engine maintenance. The accident that got me my new job was an explosion of the tank near the stern, containing fuel for two small planes carried on the ship.

At the time, the Concord was the flagship of the explorer Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd (September-November 1943), during his survey of Southeastern Pacific islands. Before heading for repairs in Panama the ship continued on a course taking it to the Easter Islands, Pitcairn Island, and Callao, Peru. It anchored in the vicinity of the Easter Islands and, later, Pitcairn Island, but no one was allowed to go ashore. While at anchor off the shore of Pitcairn Island, a boatload of natives was allowed to come aboard, some of them selling souvenirs. Among them was a giant of a man, possibly 7 feet tall, who was identified to be a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, the leader of the "Mutiny on the Bounty."

Later Childhood

We moved into a company house in Ryderwood where I completed the second semester of the fourth grade. While we were living in Ryderwood, my sister Arline was born on July 23. Shortly after that, my mother became disgusted with the environment in Ryderwood; too many uncontrolled brats wandering the streets, one of which threw a rock through our window; so she decided to move to Cougar Flats where we had lived while I was in the first grade. She found an abandoned house located on an empty 10-acre plot of ground, that looked suitable for maintaining a cow, some chickens and raising a garden. She cleaned it up and managed to get a supply of furniture on credit from the company store. When my dad came home, at the end of a week of living in a logging camp, he found the family had moved. The details of this move and our life for the next three years are beautifully described in my mother's life story, which will eventually be made available to anyone interested.

During this time my mother gave birth to two more baby boys, Patrick (Pat) on March 17, 1935, and Michael (Mickey) on March 11, 1936. I completed grades 5 through 7 in the same two-room schoolhouse where I had previously completed the first grade. Before I started the 8th grade the family move to a house in the country near Centralia, Washington, where my dad had been persuaded to take a job in a small coal mine. I completed the 8th grade by riding a bus to a school in Centralia. However, before I started to highschool, we had moved to a house near Vader, Washington, and I started my freshman year in Toledo to which I traveled by schoolbus. After a year there, the family moved back to Cougar Flats. I continued to attend highschool in Toledo, by riding a bus, for two more years.

However, by the time I was ready for my senior year, I decided Toledo was too far to go by bus, so I switched to Ryderwood, where I graduated as Salutatorian in 1941.

Early Childhood

I was born on June 10, 1923 in a humble dwelling (some would call it a shack) on an 80-acre farm located about three miles from Rupert, Idaho, so my birth certificate indicates Rupert as my birthplace. The farm belonged to my paternal grandfather, Gustave Quanstrom, born 1870 in Sweden and who immigrated to the U.S., when he was about 12 years old, with his parents who settled in Hyrum, Utah. This is where my father was born in 1903. The family eventually moved to Idaho and the farm in Rupert, where I was born. The circumstances of my birth are somewhat interesting, as described in the following excerpt copied from my father's life story:

"I worked for this farmer a couple of months. Then I got a gravel-hauling job with my Dad’s four horses on three miles of road past where we were living. I had a couple days before the job would start, so I married Emma Judd....... A friend of ours let us live in their house for the winter, rent-free. They went to California for the winter. So we honeymooned all winter. My folks were on the place next to us, so we got milk and eggs, and my Dad had a barrel of pork that went good with the beans and spuds. So we made it fine for that winter with not much money. It didn’t cost anything for fuel. We had a big pile of sagebrush, hauled in before winter set in.

We about had it made for the winter, and we drove down to visit my wife’s folks one Sunday with a horse and buggy, and coming home in the dark, we met a neighbor on his way in a Ford with no lights. His Ford hit the front wheel hub and my lower lip hit the single-tree. Mamma went out the side and hit the road on her head. I had a good hold on the reins, so the horse didn’t get to run away. The Ford went into the ditch behind us. So he wasn’t a hit-and-run driver. My wife was unconscious. The man that hit us helped me get her home and he and another Mormon elder administered to her. And we called the doctor out from Rupert. We thought we were going to lose our first baby, but everything turned out O.K.

We were living three miles out of Rupert on a place my younger brother and I were going to help our Dad buy when our first baby was born. One doctor gave her ether while the other doctor took the baby with instruments. My mother and I held her on the bed while the 200-lb doctor pulled on the instruments. I don’t see how the baby or the mother lived, but they are still around. The baby wasn’t much to look at. The instruments had mashed his one eye in and put his chin on the side of his head. He weighed 12 lbs and looked like a skeleton. This was June 10, 1923, and the day after the 4th of July we went to Emmet to work on the dam. My older brother was working at the sawmill there. He told us about the dam." (End of excerpt)

The job on the dam lasted less than a year. I have a photo of my mother holding me by the hands in the doorway of a tent house, where we lived in Emmet for awhile. I was about 2 years old. My dad says, in his life story, that he and his brother made enough on that job to send over $1000 to their dad to pay on the farm (my birthplace). After another job, thinning sugar beets around Rupert, and other miscellaneous jobs, and after a baby sister was born in June 1925, we eventually settled in Park City, Utah, where my dad worked for about a year in a mine, which was the main industry there at the time. The baby sister had died of pneumonia after only four months, before we left Idaho. Her name was Phyllis.

While we were in Park City, my sister Ruth was born, on New Years day, 1927. A few months later, Dad packed up the family, and all our belongings in his Model-T Ford, which he had acquired, and took off for Los Angeles, where we went to live with his brother. We were in Los Angeles for less than a year while my dad worked at different jobs, mainly "bucking" bananas. Then he and Mom decided to to try their luck in Oregon, where her brother Leslie (Uncle Less) lived with his family. After moving around in Portland from one place to another, we eventually found a nice three-bedroom house on a large lot not far from a public school, where I attended kindergarten for awhile. While we were in Portland, my sister Clara was born, and I had my tonsils removed.

Our next move was to Cougar Flats, Washington, about three miles out of Ryderwood, a logging town, owned and operated by the Longbell Lumber Company. It was there that my dad found work, first as a section hand on the railroad, and then as a logger. I completed my first year of school in a two-room schoolhouse. I remember that I very quickly took to reading. Before the end of the school year I had read all of the books in my classroom, which included grades 1 through 4. The teacher was impressed and tried to get me to read with the second graders, but I was too shy. I was fond of the five kids in my first-grade class, which included a cute girl my age, so the teacher decided to let me stay with the first grade. I guess she recognized I was still too immature.
While we were in Cougar Flats my dad's father died, so he took a trip to Idaho to attend the funeral. Subsequently, he decided my grandmother, whom we called "Ma", needed help in order to save the farm, the same 80-acre farm where I was born. So when I had finished the first grade, he packed up the family in our Model-T Ford, and we moved to Idaho, where we moved in with my grandmother and what remained of her family, which included my uncle Alvin and two teen-age aunts, Della and Lenna.

In the course of the next two and a half years, there were a lot of changes in our family situation. My grandmother married a farmer, Ed Berlin, who had a farm and a nice brick house about a mile out of Declo, Idaho. She and her two unmarried daughters left the Rupert farm and moved to the Berlin home in Declo. Uncle Alvin got married and moved out. So my dad was left with sole responsibility for the farm. He continued to raise potatoes and beans. We had a small herd of milk cows and a couple of horses. I helped the family economy by herding the cows along canal banks and in a sagebrush-covered desert not far from where we lived.

During the time that he was struggling to make a go of it in Idaho, two more children were born: Rulon, on September 20, 1930, and Marianne, on my birthday, June 10, 1932. Shortly after Marianne was born the situation had gotten so bad that farmers had stopped harvesting their crops due to the low Depression prices. My dad became discouraged and returned to Washington to look for work. After about five more months, in December, after getting by on potatoes, beans, milk from our cows, and a sack of flour made available by the Relief Administration, and a very cold winter, my mother decided she had all she could take. A bank was threatening to foreclose on the farm, so she sold a cow for enough to buy a train ticket to Portland for herself and the five children. She and the kids subsequently joined my dad in Ryderwood.

At the urging of various members of my family, including my dear mother, I have decided to make a stab at putting my life story on paper.  I have thought about it a great deal and have come to realize, that if I expect ever to finish, I am going to have to leave out a lot of the trivial details that pop into mind and, instead, try to concentrate on the more interesting highlights.  Furthermore, the reader should not expect this to be a literary masterpiece just because of my possible renown as a writer.   In order to keep up my momentum, I will have to try to write down my thoughts as fast as they come to me, without very much correction or editing as I go along.  Thanks to my computer and the excellent word processor I am using with it, corrections and changes, once decided upon will be easy.  Deciding can be difficult, so I'll try to keep from getting bogged down in the decision process.  I have decided to allot to this writing task one hour of my precious time each day.  If I can write one or two paragraphs a day, I should be able to finish in a year if I avoid excessive detail.  

Origins

My parents, George Leo Quanstrom (known as Leo) and Mary Emma (maiden name: Judd, and known as Emma), were both of Mormon stock. Leo was born in Hyrum, Utah on May 4, 1903 and Emma was born in Grantsville, Utah on December 2, 1904. Both came from large families. I will not try to elaborate further, as their life stories have been written and are available elsewhere. However, I would like to point out a few interesting details about their ancestry. My paternal grandfather, Gustav Qvarnström, immigrated from Sweden, together with brothers and sisters, when he was about 12 years old. This was about 1885. His wife, Miralda Anderson, was born in the USA, of Norwegian and Swedish descent. Her father, Charles Anderson, my great-grandfather, migrated to Utah with his parents, by way of the famous “Trail of Hope”, when he was 12 years old, pushing a handcart. His father was Gustave Anderson, about whom the Anderson Family Genealogy Committee has published a family history. I am fortunate enough to have a copy of this volume, which contains many interesting details about the life of Gustave Anderson.

Note: The foregoing introduction was started 5-23-91 while my mother was still among the living.  I am resuming the narration March 23,2005. I am going to try to proceed at a more rapid rate than proposed in the first paragraph of the introduction.  I hope to finish within two or three months.