Not an Easy Time

As I recently posted, after I got out of the Navy, Wanda and I bought a home in the country near Sand Springs, Oklahoma.
It was time to find a civilian job to support my wife and three young children.
In the Navy I was a Carpenter’s Mate Third Class, so I decided to go to Tulsa and join the Carpenter’s Union. They signed me up as an apprentice carpenter. The first job they sent me out on was to help build a house for the richest man in the world at that time, named J. Paul Getty. Getty was afraid of tornados and airplanes. The house was being constructed near the Tulsa airport. We built the home out of one foot thick concrete on all the walls, floors and the roof.
That job gave me a lot of experience building forms to pore the concrete into.

Because I was an apprentice, I was required to go to night school two nights a week in Tulsa. At that time I didn’t own a car.

Each night that I went to school, I had to walk the two miles from our house in the country to Sand Springs, which meant crossing the Arkansas River.
Once I got to Sand Springs, I would get a ride with a man that worked near my school. It was a total of thirteen miles for me to get to school. The man would drop me off too early for school, so I joined the YMCA and I went swimming until it was time for my class to start.
My carpenter class was two hours long, from 7 to 9 p.m.
After school, I walked to catch a ride on the trolley which went from Tulsa to Sand Springs. When I got off the trolley, I walked the two miles back home.
By the time I got home, it would be very late and I had to be up early the next morning to do all my walking again to get back to my Tulsa job by eight in the morning.

There was a bad thunder storm one night on my way home from school. Lightening was striking the ground and shooting all around me, as I came across the Arkansas River Bridge.
Boy was I afraid. I knew that if the lightening had hit me, I would have been fried. Nearby, I saw a small fruit stand store that had a porch with a roof hanging out over the building. I ran to the porch for safety until the lightening passed.
That was another time that I was being watched over.
Dad