The Camaro was already packed out in front of the house on Cypress. I remember the morning I left as if it were yesterday rather than nearly 50 years in the past. I left early that morning, possibly 7:00 AM or before.
Within a few days after I left, mom was moving to San Pedro. She'd stayed on in South Gate until we kids had finally left home for good. Ann had moved out a couple of years earlier. She was on her own path that would take her from working at the phone company, providing phone numbers to those too lazy to use a phone book; to driving a school bus; to cleaning offices in high and low rises in Long Beach; to working for Western Airlines, a job she got through her future husband Mark's aunt.
Mom already had a duplex unit rented in San Pedro. All of my record albums and comic books and books and other remaining items were boxed up to move there along with her. I had already given a hamster I inherited to Lorri, my half-sister. When I got my first permanent assignment out of OTS, I would retrieve all of what I had left behind with mom. But the rented house on Cypress (1964-1973) would soon slip into my past, as had the apartment over the garage on Orchard in South Gate (1963-4), as well as the house on Lomita in Orange (1960-3), the duplex also on Lomita in Orange (1960), the apartment in Orange (1959-60), the house on Foxley in Whittier (1954-1959), the house on Broadway in Santa Ana (circa 1952-3), base housing in George AFB (circa 1951), Valdosta (circa 1951), and Bayshore Drive in Tampa, FL (1949-50).
Only Whittier and South Gate ever seemed like home. The rest were just temporary waystations.
Base housing George AFB
13222 Foxley Drive, Whittier
I took Firestone Blvd to the Long Beach FWY north, then out through Riverside where I stopped to get a sub sandwich at The Sub Station, where I had my first sub sandwich with Darryl Butler near the University campus. But it was still way too early for anything to be open. So I got back on the freeway for I-10.
I had previously installed, with Dennis Madura's help, my 8-track tape player in the Camaro, so I did not have to rely on radio stations, fading in and out, for music. At some point I remember Diana Ross singing "Touch Me In the Morning" before I left the Riverside area for the desert and Phoenix beyond.
I arrived in Phoenix in the afternoon where I was staying at a motel near the airport. I swam in the pool and met a handsome, leanly muscular young man who was in the Marine Corps Reserves and was working highway construction near Phoenix. We had dinner together but diverged to our own rooms for the night. I drove East early the next morning after breakfast (the Marine had had to leave even earlier for work on the highway). I arrived in El Paso, TX, that evening.
Three other guys who were also heading to OTS were to meet up with me at the same motel in El Paso. They had decided to leave a day later, each driving his own car, from the L.A. area the morning I was already leaving from Phoenix. I now only remember George Tucker by name because he and I ended up in the same flight (in the blue squadron) once we arrived at Lackland. The other two ended up in other squadrons (yellow and green, I think).
The following morning, the four of us in our four separate cars headed further East for San Antonio over what seemed like endless stretches of highway going nowhere. But we finally arrived that afternoon where the four of us were staying at a motel in San Antonio near the base. Our arrival at OTS was scheduled for the next morning.
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