― Elizabeth Bishop
“There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't sit still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.”
― Robert W. Service
Erik,
As you may remember, Poppa was consumed by wanderlust. When he was in the US he couldn't get England out of his system, and when in England, he pined for America. While in the States he was always wanting to move somewhere new, never happy where he was. We moved quite a bit--Hickory, Statesville, Poughkeepsie, Cary, Huntsville, San Jose, and Hollister.
I don't think it was about a love of travel or even seeing and doing spectacular things; I think it was more a restlessness in him, his wanting to 'get on' and be successful. That probably had a lot to do with having had a difficult childhood. He always seemed to be running away from something, but I never knew what.
Mom
Momma remembers:
"Frank was always going to the local library looking in out-of-state newspapers at the 'help wanted' sections. He found an ad for a company in New York looking for an engineer. He sent his resume, and the company, which turned out to be IBM, hired him, and that is how we moved to Poughkeepsie.
We left Statesvile in March 1964. In Poughkeepsie, we stayed in a motor motel (a hotel designed for motorists) with cottages clustered around a pond. The temperatures went way down below zero, so Barbara, Maureen, and Frank were able to ice skate, a novelty coming from the South.
We arrived in a blizzard. When Frank awoke the first morning of his new job, the temperature had dropped to 28 below zero, and our car, an older Oldsmobile, wouldn't start. He was so scared he'd lose his job if he didn't show up for work, so he walked! The plant was only about two miles away, but it was 28 below zero! When he finally got there, and his coworkers heard that he'd walked, they told him he could've died. Someone from work gave him a ride back to the motel, and the motel owner ran him to work whenever the car wouldn't start. We stayed at the motel about 3-4 weeks.
We had a bit of a rough start. Maureen and Barbara were entertaining Darryl, swinging him about in the motel room, and he hit his head on the sharp corner of a coffee table. We had to rush to the emergency room to get him stitched up.
Eventually we bought and moved into a split level house at 46 Nassau Road in a planned development called Crown Heights. Since we had no family and no friends in New York, we would go sightseeing at every opportunity. We loved the countryside in New York. It reminded us so much of Derbyshire in England with dry stacked stone walls dividing the properties.
Once we took a week long car trip to Niagara Falls and the Finger Lakes and enjoyed a boat ride on one of the lakes. Upstate New York was beautiful, so we took advantage of all there was to see. I also enjoyed the food there, so different from the South. At the local market I would chat with the butcher and the fishmonger; he was amazed that I could name all the fish."
"I think moving to Poughkeepsie put us on our feet financially. It was a good move."
--Joan Shelton
Maureen's memories of Poughkeepsie--
"I enjoyed living in Poughkeepsie and made good friends at Spackenkill Junior HIgh School--Debbie Purdy, Eileen Tritschler, Ann Smythe, and Martha Van Buren. Debbie and I lived the closest to each other and would bike to each other's homes, or ask a parent to drive us to the local mall to shop or go to a movie.
IBM had a country club for their employees with a club house, golf course, and, in the Winter, an outdoor ice skating rink. Barbara and I would walk up there and sled down the golf course hills when we got a good snowfall, and I would go there to ice skate. They would also host musical groups for entertainment, and it was there, when I was 15, that I saw Diana Ross and the Supremes and The Dixie Cups.
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| The Dixie Cups are an American pop music girl group of the 1960s. They are best known for their 1964 million-selling record "Chapel of Love." |
We went to Zion Episcopal Church in Wappinger Falls, a nearby town. One Sunday morning, Mam, Barbara, Darryl and I came home from church, and Dad, who wasn't much of a church goer, had for some reason decided to give Mitzi, our standard poodle a haircut. He had sheared the poor dog to the skin, and we were all mad at him for a week.
We did sightsee a lot while living in New York. We went to West Point Military Academy, drove along the Hudson River, to Hyde Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's house, toured the Catskill Mountains, the Fingerlakes, and visited a Santa's village in upstate New York.
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| Santa's Village, North Pole, N.Y. |
We had nice neighbors across the street, Tony and Maurice. Her father owned a bakery, and she brought us the best brownies, thick with chocolate frosting, and from time to time, a deep dish style pizza. It was more of a focaccia style bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it, but no other toppings.
They had no children, so perhaps doted on the three of us. I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated, Tony, who worked in a book publishers, bought us each a commemorative book, The Torch is Passed.
In 1965 Mom went back to England on an IBM charter flight, taking Darryl with her. Her flight left from Dulles in Washington, D.C., so we drove down there from New York, and after seeing her off, Dad took Barbara and me to see the sights around and including the Lincoln Memorial. We also stopped in New York City on the way back home, and he took us up the Empire State Building and on a boat ride around Manhattan.
