I saved this photograph and a couple of earlier ones to make a point. Ann and I discussed this recently. Mom often told us that one of the reasons she married dad was that his parents paid for her train ticket down to Florida. She felt obliged to marry him--a very bad justification for getting married. However, he was a military officer. The two of them did travel about the country with assignments in states and at bases she'd never been to before. For her, being born and raised in rural Kansas, even though she had lived in Phoenix and L.A. during and after the war, it was still an exciting life, being a military wife. She did not have to work in a bank anymore. After we were born, they returned to California where dad's parents had that wonderful house on the beach with the sailboat. It all must have seemed pretty glamorous for her.
Unfortunately, after dad was shipped overseas to Japan, and was then about to be sent to Korea, he did not want to run the risk of becoming a P.O.W. again. (His sole story to me of life in the camp was that when the Germans gave them raw potatoes to eat, even if they were covered in mud, he explained, "You rubbed off the mud and you ate it. It was all they gave us to eat sometimes.") When dad resigned his commission, he was a civilian. No longer would they be sent to San Antonio, Texas; or Denver, Colorado; or Biloxi, Mississippi; or Tampa, Florida; or Valdosta, Georgia; or Victorville, California. No longer was mom able to be part of Women's Clubs like the one above. Or attend parties or other functions on base.
Mom was then simply a suburban housewife with two children in the 1950's. She may have gone all out with the birthday parties and Halloween parties and decorations or presents for Christmas. But it wasn't very glamorous. She was no longer meeting and getting her picture taken with the movie stars such as Ginger Rogers or Paul Henried. She was no longer married to a military officer. She was married to a paint salesman who ran a paint store in Whittier, California. By the late 1950's, the grandparents no longer had the house on the water in Newport Beach or the sailboat. They soon would live in Placentia, CA, not very glamorous compared to Newport Beach.
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