I was born in 1953. I really have no memories to share to speak of from those early days. I have one vague memory from Denfield Street. I’m standing on a gate watching people load a moving truck. For years that memory was clear as a bell, and of course it’s fading now. So obviously we were leaving Denfield. My earliest memory after that is from the trip to Oakridge. I believe that was the summer of 1956 because I turned three in Oak Ridge. I remember being in the car, and looking forward to the next motel. I remember David feeding a horse and getting bitten. That horrified me and probably made me afraid of horses the rest of my life. They are so big! I remember Beth falling and splitting open her chin or her tongue in the lobby of a hotel/motel. It was very traumatic in my mind, with blood. I have a vague recall of Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. That also is fading. My picture of the place we lived in Oak Ridge was in a long row of houses on a grassy hill. The hill sloped down to a lower area and then back up to another row of houses. I got my first bee sting in Oak Ridge. I remember Daddy carrying me sobbing up to his and moms bed. They put baking soda and water on my bee sting and asked me what would make me feel better? I asked for a banana, I remember that, and it tasted so good. I also remember fireflies, which I had never seen and seemed completely magical!
Following on Susan’s remembrance of the housing at Oak Ridge, I found this picture. I recall that we were in a building with two wings–an entry in the middle. It may have been two stories. And I think the center entry was ‘gabled’. Our quarters were to the right as you entered. We had a big sitting room with windows that looked out onto a grassy open area with another similar building across the way. There was a ‘not very big’ tree in the middle of that patch. One night a terrible thunderstorm arose. We all came and sat on Mom’s bed and watched the storm out the window. At one point, lightning hit the tree and blasted it to pieces. We were terrified. Nick? Sue?
I am very happy to have Susan’s contributions. I am hoping that maybe Nick will chime in as well. We moved from Denfield to Montgomery Dr. in 1955 just before school started–my report card anchors that date. I was five and started First Grade at Cathedral. We went to Oak Ridge, as Susan says, in the summer of ’56. I had to come back early from Tennessee with Gommy on the train because I had to start Second Grade at St. Thomas More. Drove all the way across the country in the green Plymouth station wagon. On the way, as Susan recalls, Beth split some part of her mouth on a barstool in a Boise motel. We also had to get off the road early on one day because there was a tornado in the distance. And I did have my hand bitten by a horse in Kentucky close to the end of our journey; entirely my fault. I curled my hand while feeding him hay.
Halfway through Binder A–A Puzzle
I was able to carve out some time late this afternoon to go back to Binder A, scan some more pictures, and do a small amount of sorting. Some things had definitely gotten out of order in the years since Dad put this together. I was not dismayed–part of the pleasure of doing this work is to find things that are not clear and to try to make them clear without skewing the information in the direction of my own interpretation.
This became clearly apparent around page 17 of the binder. I came to a picture of a group of kids sitting on the floor of the Denfield kitchen. I pulled the picture out (gloves on of course) and scanned it. the date was June 55 and the back of the picture said it was my birthday party. I did think that the girl in the foreground was probably my long lost friend Bobby, and that the boy staring at the camera was probably Herby Ernster or Jimmy Price. However, June 55 would have been a strange time to celebrate my December birthday. The picture also showed a younger Porter child. I am pretty sure it is Susan whose birthday would have been at that time. Looking at the photo stirred my memories. A handful of Dad’s hand-written photo captions were all together between the sleeves. Clearly this material had been organized differently at some point and then had been inadvertently disordered. I could deduce from some of the captions which picture they might belong with. There was a caption referencing “Susan’s birthday party” which led me to believe my suspicion about the one photo. There were also pictures that leaped years ahead of the narrative in the binder. I decided to stop where I was, write this brief commentary, and then come back to it at some future point.