Bill: Coral Gables – New Jersey

This post is based on an album I put together in 1976 or so called “Bill – The Story So Far,” supplemented with photos from an album that my Mom put together for me about a year later and some photos we found in Mom’s stuff after she died. This post covers our time in Coral Gables, Florida and Short Hills, New Jersey, 1966-1971, and touches on our trips to Valdosta, Georgia and our initial journey to Hong Kong.

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Coral Gables, Florida, 1966-1969

We moved from Aruba back to Coral Gables, Florida, in the summer of 1966 and lived in a house at 875 South Alhambra Circle with a canal in the back where Dad docked his boat. The house we lived in has been replaced with a newer one, but the neighborhood looks pretty much the same, from a satellite, at least.

Sue and Laurie were both in Boston during these years. Sue was at Simmons College; Laurie graduated from the Cambridge School at Weston in 1967 and went for a year to Boston University. We saw more of Len, who was living not far away in Kendall, Florida, with her husband Richard Molinari and son Scott who was born in 1965.

At some point during these years, I remember Dad would tell one of his favorite jokes and say it reminded him of me. He did it multiple times at parties or with friends. It was about a baby boy who seemed healthy in all respects but never spoke, never cried, was totally mute. The parents took him to doctors but no physical malady was ever found. The boy grew older and eventually the family became reconciled to raising a mute child. Then one day, the family was having hot dogs around the table when boy piped up, “Would you please pass the mustard?” The family was astonished. The boy spoke! And a complete sentence! They said, “My goodness, you can speak! Why haven’t you said anything before?” The boy replied, “Well, everything’s been alright until now.” I guess that pretty well summed up my childhood for Dad and for me.

I went to school at Sunset Elementary from the middle of second grade through fifth grade. I remember coming into second grade in the latter half of the year and being very disoriented for a while. Third grade wasn’t much better, and I recall some especially bad experiences with SRA Readers, a method used to promote independent reading. I hated them, especially the stupid questions at the end of each story — evidently I wasn’t alone. In fourth grade I had my first male teacher, Mr. Needham, and I remember liking that year, though I can’t think of a single event from it. The following year my teacher was Mrs. Dix whom I particularly disliked but, again, I can’t think of a single example why.

Perhaps the strongest memory of all my years at Sunset Elementary was the day they basically shut down the school to film a couple of scenes for the TV series Gentle Ben. There was a large production crew with lights, cameras, tents, and equipment to shoot what ended up being a minute or two of screen time. A few schoolkids got to be extras in one scene on the playground, playing bounceball in the background while the TV dad (Dennis Weaver) talked the TV son (Clint Howard, the less famous brother of Ron Howard) through some crisis. The rest of us students got to watch them film the scene and we had to stay very quiet. The erstwhile star of the series, a black bear named Ben, did not show up (to our disappointment).

I honestly cannot remember any individual friends from Coral Gables. There were plenty of other kids in the neighborhood and we sometimes played football or baseball in the street (no one’s yard was big enough). I don’t recall being particularly antisocial and I remember doing things with other groups of kids, but I can’t remember any of their names. I do remember riding my bike the mile or so to school every day, and basically riding my bike all over the neighborhood and vicinity, wherever I wanted to go.

What I do remember was becoming increasingly obsessed with sports, both playing and consuming them in various ways. In our early years in Coral Gables, I tagged along (was dragged along) with Mom to tennis at the Riviera Country Club. She enrolled me in a number of tennis lessons and clinics, many with a wizened old coach named Leo. He seemed to have a lifetime’s worth of different gimmicks and tortures for teaching tennis to kids. One of them involved a contraption of several sandbags and rubber bands so kids could practice hitting on their own without Leo having to be involved. I guess I learned some basic groundstrokes but I didn’t learn to love tennis. I mostly remember having to pick up lots of balls and sweep the clay courts in the deadly heat. And those are the good memories. There was also a golf course and big pool at Riviera but we very rarely used them; maybe we just had a tennis membership.

I got interested in golf a little later, maybe 4th or 5th grade. Mom carted me over to the Colonial Palms Golf Course, a short par-3 course on Dixie Highway in South Miami for lessons. It was a small course, par 60, well suited for kids, women and old folks. It eventually became my haunt for many afternoons and weekends. Mom sometimes played with me but more often would simply drop me off and I would stay for hours. On my most glorious day, I played three full rounds, 54 holes, walking and pulling my little bag all the way. I became a decent little golfer for my age, but I don’t remember getting into competitions or any tournaments. I enjoyed the solitary struggle of golf, meticulously keeping score and trying to beat my record on each individual hole.

My real sports love, however, was baseball. I began playing on Khoury League teams when I was 8 years old. By the time I was 9 in 1967, we made what must have been an early summer trip to Boston to see Sue and Laurie. We went to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park and I was entranced. The Red Sox were in the midst of one of their few great seasons, eventually going to the World Series before losing in a classic to St. Louis. Plus, Carl Yastrzemski (whose name I can still spell without checking) won the Triple Crown, leading the league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in. I became fully obsessed with that team over the course of the season, and with major league baseball in general, to which I hadn’t paid much attention until then. I had posters of Yaz and George “Boomer” Scott in my room. I would religiously watch the Game of the Week (there was only one game broadcast each week) with Curt Gowdy and began reading The Sporting News regularly (Sports Illustrated was too wordy…except for the swimsuit issue).

I began to collect baseball cards assiduously in 1968-69, frequently pedaling to the store to buy new packs, discarding the gum which tasted like cardboard. They stayed in a shoebox for years, then in the 1980s I filed them in three big binders once I suspected they might be worth something. Someday, in my spare time, I should start cataloging them online and track their value. Most are not worth much, but a few are. According to eBay, a Johnny Bench card, one of which I gave to Woody Rech long ago, is now worth anywhere from $7 to several hundred, depending on its condition (and the right buyer). That’s a whole other line of investigation and time sink for someday. As an incentive to myself, here’s a good website that values cards.

I got my hands on a baseball home game that involved rolling dice to determine each pitch and hit, combined with a statistical listing of each major league team’s roster. I became completely obsessed, playing that game day and night, keeping score of each game and keeping season statistics for each player and team, all by hand. It was by far my most intensive and effective introduction to multiplication, division, percentages and probabilities. I still have the basic game material and a season’s worth of worksheets, though I’d have a hard time telling you how to play it anymore. The game was made by “Research Game Co.” and I can’t find any reference to it on the Internet, which is unusual. It consumed me for an intense period.

I started going more frequently to spring training baseball games when I could talk someone into taking me to Miami Stadium. The Baltimore Orioles trained in Miami and became my second-favorite team. In spring of 1969, I saw a game with the Orioles and Washington Senators and was able to hang around afterwards outside the locker room for autographs. I managed to snag autographs of Ted Williams (the Senators manager in his first year), Frank Howard, Brooks Robinson and others. Now if I can only find that sheet of paper…

I played a lot of baseball, too, eventually becoming a pretty good pitcher, 1st baseman and 3rd baseman. For a while I tried to be a catcher but that was a lot of work and very hard on the knees. I remember going to a summer baseball camp where they worked us really hard through the hot Florida summer sun. We would get breaks to suck on some ice and sometimes an orange. I was slotted as a catcher at that camp, with the full outfit of protective gear that only made everything hotter. It was the end of my catching career. It was much easier to be a pitcher or play first base.

To practice pitching at home, I used to get a tennis ball and pitch to a strike zone drawn on our garage door, over and over. I did that day after day in the afternoons, imagining entire game sequences in my mind, keeping track of balls and strikes. I’m not sure how Mom or our neighbors had any patience for me, that ball banging loudly against the door for hours at a time.

Maybe all of this is why I don’t recall having friends.

One more sports highlight was attending the 1969 Super Bowl between the New York Jets and Baltimore Colts. Uncle Joe Barnett got tickets through his work and/or affiliations with the Green Bay Packers — I guess maybe he bought tickets early anticipating the Packers would return since they’d been to the first two Super Bowls. When they didn’t, I guess there was no one else to invite but Dad and me. This was the game where Joe Namath and the Jets upset the heavily favored Colts. It was the first NFL game I ever attended and it was a historic one. Nominally it was the first “Super Bowl” since it was the first time they used that name, but it’s now officially called Super Bowl III, once they finally adopted roman numerals. Do I remember anything about the actual game? No, but I remember it was crowded, exciting, and the fighter jet flyover during the National Anthem was cool. And I still have the program, which could be worth dozens of dollars today.

Another whole set of memories from these Coral Gables years involves fishing with Dad. For the first several years we were in Coral Gables, I was Dad’s first mate. As obsessed as I was with baseball, Dad was with his boat and fishing. Any free time he had seemed to be devoted to fiddling with something on the boat. We would go out on weekends when the weather cooperated and sometimes when it didn’t. It was almost always deep sea fishing, taking an hour or more to wind through the canals, into Biscayne Bay and out to the Gulf Stream.

For several years I enjoyed going, doing the few things that Dad let me do. That usually meant hanging on for a long time while we bounced our way out to a likely fishing ground. Once we slowed down to trolling speed, I usually steered the boat while he scurried around the back, rigging ballyhoo as bait, setting lines and outriggers, and who knows what else. I became good at spotting seagulls, trash and seaweed in the water, all indicators of possible baitfish and bigger fish underneath. We usually tried to catch dolphin (now commonly called dorado or mahimahi to reduce confusion with the mammal dolphins) but would occasionally snag other trophies like kingfish, wahoo, sailfish, and sharks. I’d often get to reel them in, but Dad took care of gaffing, landing (killing), and eventually cleaning the fish.

The more we fished, the less I began to enjoy it. The days were interminably long and mostly dull, with a few flashes of excitement when we got something on the line. I enjoyed certain aspects quite a lot, like the magical shafts of light that penetrated the water on a glass-calm day, the occasional sightings of sea turtles, dolphin pods, flying fish, frigate birds and spinning sharks. I also quite liked the taste of a ham and cheese on rye and Coke, both ice-cold out of the cooler. But glass-calm days were few and far between, and not great for fishing. Increasingly, the things I liked had less to do with fishing, and eventually Dad sought out other first mates. I’m not sure exactly when he became buddies with Tom Fitzgerald, a fellow Exxon colleague, but they eventually became a great team and I became a more sporadic, less enthusiastic third wheel. At least I was better on the boat than Mom. Whenever she came and got her hands on the wheel, she would turn the boat toward home as soon as she could.

For a short while, maybe around 4th grade, Mom and Dad tried to make a man out of me by enrolling me in Cub Scouts. Mom made a big effort and became a Den Mother for a year. I seem to remember her spending more time on it than me, organizing meetings, sewing patches, getting uniforms together. It didn’t work out well for either of us; neither of us lasted into the second year, much less advancing to Boy Scouts.

We have a handful of other photos from that era that I can’t place into any particular context.

The following three photos all came from the same photographer in Coral Gables (R. Pardo), I’m guessing around 1968. I don’t know if there’s a story behind them, but maybe Sue or Laurie can fill me in. I don’t think they were passport photos, maybe early college portraits?

Our vacations during this era, as best as I can remember, usually consisted of driving up and down the east coast to visit Mom and Dad’s families in Valdosta, Georgia and/or going all the way to Boston to see Sue and Laurie. The photo at Cypress Gardens may have been a pit stop on the way to Valdosta. I vaguely remember being there for a day; it wasn’t a highlight or a regular destination for us. Ditto for visiting Ann Carroll at her horse farm (I guess, more technically, a house with a couple of horses) in Ocala — I only remember stopping there once, but it was very pretty. Judging by my outfit, it may have been the same day as this next tale…

The photo by the canal was taken the day Dad decided to buy the lot at Powell Drive in Riviera Beach that became their retirement house. It was probably in 1969, not long before we moved to New Jersey. Over many years, we sometimes visited Riviera Beach, staying at the Seaspray Inn which was never great, but cheap and convenient to the beach. Dad liked fishing out of Riviera Beach, knowing it was the closest the Gulf Stream came to the Florida coast. I had no idea they were looking for retirement locations but we ended up stopping by this lot in the Yacht Harbor Manor development that was just getting going. We drove off, heading north toward Valdosta when Dad (and Mom, but mostly Dad) decided to turn around and plopped down a deposit on the lot. It was one of the most spur-of-the-moment decisions I ever saw Dad make, and set the stage for nearly 40 years of Florida retirement life.

Valdosta, Georgia

This seems as good a place as any to talk about Valdosta, though it may warrant a post of its own. Valdosta was a regular stop while Dad parents, Susie and Pop-Pop, were still alive. We would sometimes stay at their little house, Mom and Dad in the guest room and I on the couch in the den, but it got complicated because the den also had the only TV and was where everyone would hang out. More often, we stayed nearby with Mom’s sister, Sister (Frances, though no one called her that) and her husband, Jamie Carroll. They had a much nicer, larger home. Their kids, Sugie, Ann, Bo, and Jimbo were older and had mostly moved out, leaving room for us. Sister and Jamie also had a lake house on Lake Frances, 20-30 minutes out of town, and sometimes we’d stay out there. Sister and Jamie were warm and wonderful, much more fun to be with than Susie and Pops.

A highlight of visiting Valdosta was having Sunday supper at Susie and Pop-Pop’s when their housekeeper, Otha, would make a huge batch of crispy fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and butter beans to die for. It was all fabulous. Otha was a lovely, caring Black lady that cooked and cleaned for Susie and Pop-Pop. I’m not sure how she put up with Susie’s grumpiness or Pop-Pop putting ketchup on nearly everything, but she was with them for many years.

We would visit other family members on both the Goodloe (Susie’s family) and Garbutt (Mom’s family) sides. Other than Dad’s sister Helen, who was married to Joe Barnett in Milwaukee, there were no other Duncans (see more about the Barnetts). I’ve addressed our various family trees and branches in other posts: see Sue’s Memory Book for Mom and Dad, Garbutt Family Documents, Goodloe Genealogy, and the Duncan Family Tree.

I think Susie and Pop-Pop passed away after we left for Hong Kong. I don’t remember seeing them in their final stages or very ill, and I think they passed away relatively close to one another. I honestly don’t recall. Mom and/or Dad went back to deal with funerals and such; I never attended one. Once they passed, however, we hardly went back to Valdosta. Sue has stayed in touch with several Garbutt cousins and visits somewhat regularly, but I haven’t been there in 40 years, at least, other than to get gas once or twice passing by on I-75.

A few years ago, Sue and Laurie joined Leecy and Susan Barnett to plant a tree or two at Valdosta State University to commemorate Helen and Sara who graduated there when it was Georgia State Woman’s College. That was a nice gesture and one of the few times they got together. I’ve got pictures from that, somewhere, too.

Short Hills, New Jersey, 1969-1971

In summer 1969, we moved back to New Jersey to a house within blocks of our old one in Short Hills. I’m pretty sure it was 153 Tennyson Drive; the house on Google Maps actually looks more or less the same (expanded a little with dormer windows on top), so maybe that’s it. Anyway, it’s close.

Our house backed onto Canoe Brook Country Club which offered lots of opportunities for play, as long as we didn’t get in the way of actual members using the course. In the evenings, after the last foursomes had come through, I would sometimes hit golf balls for a hole or two. The real treat, though, was in winter. The course’s hills were excellent for sledding and I had easy access — no fences or walls, just a small frozen culvert to cross. This was my first real taste of snow and sledding became my prime winter activity. Most of the time I was on wide open hills, but there were a few daredevil runs on icy cart paths through trees that I was insane to try. I was in New Jersey for two winters and tried a little bit of skiing and skating, but sledding was the right fit for me.

I went for 6th grade to Hartshorn Elementary, the public school nearby but remember hardly anything about it. The school was only a mile away from home, but I had to catch a bus there and back each day. New Jersey was always very confusing for me to navigate, partly because I was always driven everywhere. Fairly early on, I got a nice bike but it was soon stolen from our driveway and I had little interest to get another one. Other than school, there was nowhere nearby to pedal to, plus there were hills which I’d never encountered in Florida. And it was cold half the time. So there was a lot of time in cars on lots of little, winding roads with lots of trees and lots of houses, punctuated from time to time by little towns like Short Hills, Millburn, and Summit. Everything looked the same.

In the spring of 1970, I played Little League baseball and was proud to be a Buzzard. I was by this time a reasonably accomplished pitcher and third baseman, but the competition in New Jersey was stiffer and more organized than what I’d seen in Coral Gables. I was selected for an All-Star team from our league which went to post-season playoffs, the first step toward the Little League World Series. I remember a long road trip to play the team at Toms River and got trounced, ending our short-lived dreams. It was my only season in official Little League — I don’t know why I didn’t do it the following season. I still loved baseball, but something augured against it.

Perhaps as a substitute, we used to have frequent games in our backyard that joined with the neighbor’s yard into a treeless open space big enough for a field. We had enough neighborhood kids to have a few fielders and concocted a game like stickball where you got to bat as long as you didn’t hit an “out”. To cut down on distance and potential damage, we used a tennis ball and a bat that was sawed lengthwise to almost resemble a cricket bat. It was a makeshift game but we played all the time when the weather cooperated. I don’t remember any of the neighbor kids, but there always seemed to be some around.

For 7th grade, I shifted to the Short Hills Country Day School, which later merged with The Pingry School, and I started on the path of a proper young preppie. This was a much smaller school and I actually have some fond memories of it. I made some friends there, none of whom I’ve kept in touch with, but at least I remember them: Malcolm Walsh, Ning Li, Ron (someone?…not Weasley but at least I remember his first name). We had an English teacher, Mr. Perlmutter, who actually encouraged my writing even though he was kind of a creepy old dude. I’ve saved a couple of my (painful) essays from that year but can’t yet find my opus, “Pepe, the Pole-Traveling Penguin” about a penguin that travels from South Pole to North and the friends (walrus, whales, polar bear…) he meets on the way. Mr. Perlmutter helped get a couple of my pieces included in an anthology of school essays and poems, my first quasi-published works.

The Beacon Hill Club was a big part of our world in New Jersey. The club mainly had tennis courts and a set of caged paddle tennis courts for play in the winter. I remember playing a lot of doubles there with Edith and Arnie Matthies, old Esso friends from Baton Rouge, me rotating in every few games with Mom and Dad on the occasions when all 5 of us were there. We also had some good paddle tennis games in the cooler weather where I became adept at hitting the ball off the wire screens that caged the court. I enjoyed playing the angles that resembled the bumper pool table we had in our family room — another diversionary item I spent a lot of time on in the evenings.

The club had a skating rink that I tried a handful of times. Mom bought me some custom-sized skates that I know were expensive, but I could barely let go of the wall without falling. When I did fall (which was within seconds of the few moments I was brave enough to let go of the wall), I wasn’t able to get back up on my own, floundering like a giraffe on ice. I vaguely recall having a similar experience at the famous Rockefeller Center skating rink in New York City, clutching the wall all the way around for a few laps before quitting. So much for that fantasy, which was mostly Mom’s.

The club was also the site of a cotillion class that Mom signed me up for in the spring of 1971. I hated that class with a burning passion. I didn’t like dancing, didn’t like the music, was terrified of girls, and was deeply embarrassed the whole time. When the multi-week class as finally over and we had our final formal dance, I got back in the car with Mom and told her, “Don’t you EVER make me do that again!” And she didn’t. The one other small anecdote that I recall from that last dance was winning a door prize — a random prize, not based on skill. I picked out a 45-rpm record, Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” which was the first actual record I ever selected and owned.

In March 1970 a solar eclipse occurred just off the east coast, giving us a partial eclipse in New Jersey. It was fun actually figuring out how to see it.

A big part of life in New Jersey was that Dad commuted by train every day into New York City to work at Exxon’s headquarters building near Rockefeller Center. Mom and I would go into the city fairly regularly to see shows, have dinner, or sometimes see baseball games. Exxon had season boxes for both the Yankees and the Mets and sometimes Dad would snag them when they were available. Mostly we would see the Mets because it was easier to drive and park there, and 1969 was their “Miracle Mets” season when they won the World Series against Baltimore. Tickets were a little easier to get in 1970.

We sometimes went to Broadway shows including “Fiddler on the Roof” (with Theodore Bikel) and “Hello Dolly” (with Pearl Bailey) or movies and productions at Radio City Music Hall. We would have dinner in town, often at one of Dad’s favorite seafood restaurants (I can’t remember the name, but Laurie remembers the place; I remember it had a captain’s wheel at the front). Once in a while we would meet Dad for drinks at the Rainbow Room lounge on the top of 30 Rockefeller Center. That lounge had (has) the most amazing view of Manhattan. You truly feel like you’re on top of the world having a drink there. I’ve gone back a couple of times over the ensuing years and have been appalled at the actual prices, but in our New Jersey days it was a real treat that Mom and Dad enjoyed. Once or twice we took guests to dinner and the show at the Rainbow Room itself, but that was an over-the-top experience that was a very rare treat.

Mom’s older (oldest?) brother, Glenn Garbutt and his wife, Phebe, were alive at that point, living in a nice brownstone in Manhattan. We would visit them at their house and sometimes eat there or go out to dinner. Glenn was a tall, soft-spoken, very kind Southern gentleman who had somehow fashioned a successful career as a banker in New York. Phebe was a smart NY/NJ northern lady who dabbled as a painter. Miraculously, here is their wedding announcement in the NY Times. Both seemed quite old and were retired by the time I got to know them, but they ranked high among my favorite relatives, because they were nice to me and they weren’t in Valdosta.

At some point in 1969-70 while we were in New Jersey, Sue and Laurie cooked up their adventure in Australia. They had both been living in Boston, Sue graduated and was casting about for a teaching career; Laurie was working, having left Boston University after one year. One or the other learned of work opportunities and a visa program in Australia that encouraged single women to come to the country. They signed up and elected to go together. I can remember sending them off from JFK airport, not knowing when we might see them again. They found an apartment and Sue was assigned a job teaching Australian history at a school about an hour away by bus. Laurie landed a job as a nightclub photographer, I think. They lasted less than 6 months when Laurie, who didn’t much like Australia and complained about the smell of lamb everywhere, got mono and asked to come home. Faced with the prospect of being in Australia alone, Sue bailed and got on the same flight. I remember picking them up again at JFK, very delighted to see them. They stayed with us for a while, getting local jobs to pay Dad back for the flights. Sue or Laurie could tell this story in more detail [See Laurie’s comments at end of this post, plus Sue’s account in Gramma Sue Stories, starting on page 69]. It was an odd interlude.

I recall several big summer vacations while we were in New Jersey. In the late summer of 1969 we took an “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” type of bus tour of Europe. It was the first time in Europe for Mom, Dad and me. I think it was arranged through the Exxon Travel Club, but we didn’t know anyone else on the tour. We caught a discount charter airline to London, spent a couple of days there, then met up with our tour bus in Amsterdam. The bus took us through Cologne to Weisbaden, Munich, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Venice, Florence, Rome, through Pisa to Genoa, Geneva, and Paris. I was amazed to find the itinerary recently and see that I remembered pretty much the entire route.

It was a three-week tour and by the end we were exhausted, over-cathedraled, and over-exposed to the 40 or so other people on the bus. I was by far the youngest in the group. I ate hamburgers the whole way, no matter where we were, except for Rome where I was excited to have spaghetti and eagerly informed everyone on the bus that we were going to a Roman Orgy. I was under the impression that was where one ate way too much and then visited the vomitorium; other people on the bus seemed to have other ideas. The whole trip was a heavy dose of Europe, but it whet our appetites to return and see more at our own pace.

In 1970 we took an extended Canadian driving trip to Nova Scotia, Quebec City and Montreal. In Nova Scotia, we headed to Cape Breton, specifically Baddeck, to see Nelson Robinson and his wife who had a summer home there. Nelson had been with Dad at Georgia Tech and was a math professor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. We didn’t see him much over my lifetime, but he was a friendly character with a red Jaguar, one of Dad’s few (only?) non-Esso friends. Their place in Baddeck was a rustic cabin with a great view over the Bras D’Or lake. I remember a wonderful evening eating fresh grilled lamb chops at their cabin. We also had a memorable visit to the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck, which I revisited in 2017 because I’d had such a good time 47 years before. From Nova Scotia, we cut over to Quebec City and had a fine time, staying at the Chateau Frontenac and learning about Canadian history, the gist of which seemed to be “We could have been French!” (for better or worse, depending on one’s perspective — the Quebec separatist movement was just gaining steam, not that I knew much about it). We finished with a few days in Montreal, highlighted by wandering the grounds of Expo 67, one of the last big-deal World’s Fair locations. I remember Mom and Dad dragging me out of the grounds past a free concert by Wilson Pickett (Aug. 11, 1970, which is what pegs this whole trip in 1970 for me). I really wanted to stay but there was no way Mom and Dad were going to sit through it.

I’m not quite sure of the timing, but I also remember a couple of short trips with Mom and Dad to New Orleans, one when I was maybe 10 and another when I was a teenager of maybe 15 (so when we were in Hong Kong). Mom and Dad loved New Orleans, especially the classic restaurants like Antoine’s (America’s oldest family run restaurant), Arnaud’s (home of Shrimp Arnaud, a family favorite Mom learned to make) and Galatoire’s (classic French Creole cuisine, jackets required). I remember on my early visit being happy to stay in the hotel and get room service hamburgers while Mom and Dad hit the town. On my second trip as a teenager I was more interested in the food and we had fine meals at each these favorite places. Dad also loved the music of Al Hirt (trumpet) and Pete Fountain (clarinet) and enjoyed going to their clubs. I was into music and jazz and looked forward to joining them but discovered I was underage and not allowed in. New Orleans was the last place we expected to enforce age restrictions for a budding jazz fan. I was disappointed but we were able to see the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as something of a consolation.

Heading to Hong Kong

The commuting from Short Hills into New York City was a grind for Dad and he evidently was having a rough time in his career (as little as I knew of it). Exxon had downsized its activities with Esso Chemical and Latin America which precipitated our move to New Jersey. I think for a while he actually had the position of Secretary to the Board of Directors (or perhaps the Executive Committee) but I haven’t been able to confirm that. I do remember asking at some point what his job was and he described it as “a glorified errand boy.” Dad hardly ever spoke about his actual work or career, even after he retired. I can only guess at the motivations that drove him to originally leave Valdosta, make Standard Oil and its permutations his career, and move the family from place to place over time. Mom’s attitudes in all this was a mystery to me as well. I don’t think she enjoyed New Jersey as much as Coral Gables. She later flourished in Hong Kong, but then we all did. But she never talked about it much, even after retirement.

Sometime in the spring of 1971, Dad let us know we would be moving to Hong Kong. It was a complete shift for Dad and would likely be his last posting, particularly since Exxon had a mandatory retirement age of 60 for overseas executives and at that point he was 53. He seemed relieved to get the offer, and may have gotten some strings pulled by some longtime friends from Baton Rouge, George Piercy (then an Exxon board member) and Chuck Hedlund. We had not the slightest clue where Hong Kong was or what life would be like there — I only knew stories of people that lived their whole lives on boats, floating villages of junks. Laurie says this about learning we were heading to Hong Kong:

I remember very well the phone call where Mom and Dad told me they were moving. It was a serious deja-vue experience for me with lots of distinctly detailed memories, very early one morning when I was in my bedroom in Arnold Circle (in Boston), and I already knew what Mom was going to say. Also, just before they called me, they had called Susie and Pop-Pop. Pop-Pop had said to them, “So, are you calling to tell us that you’re moving to some crazy place like Hong Kong or something?”

In August of 1971 we headed out to Hong Kong, via San Francisco, Hawaii and Japan. My San Francisco memories are minimal but included in a separate post. We stayed in Honolulu for a few days, scoping out Waikiki, Pearl Harbor and being good tourists in the shops and restaurants. We then flew to the Big Island to stay at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel which was the first big resort built on the Kona Coast. We had a memorable flight on Royal Hawaiian from Honolulu to Kona, the only ones other than the pilot on the little Cessna plane. I got the co-pilot’s seat and we had a glorious personalized guided tour as the pilot buzzed along the cliffs of Molokai and into the crater of Haleakela on Maui before touching down on Hawaii. The Mauna Kea resort was beautiful; we enjoyed the beach, pools, golf, meals, and the museum-quality grounds. I loved Hawaii and have been delighted to return many times with Mom & Dad, our honeymoon, and with Allie. 

We toured in Japan for maybe a week, staying in Tokyo for several days before taking the bullet train to Kyoto and Osaka. This was our first real taste of Asia and it was both fascinating and a disorienting culture shock. I haven’t found any photos of Japan, but they must be somewhere. One vivid memory was being in the Tokyo train station surrounded by a sea of Japanese businessmen all dressed in white shirts, ties and black pants. Even at 13, Mom and Dad could always find me because my red-haired head poked out above the crowd.

Finally, we boarded one more flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong.

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Related Post: Cultural Memories, 1966-1971

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