moving to california

This is another in my series of autobiographical essays, prompted by the thought that if I counted backwards at a pace of 1 essay per week from today, I would have started writing my essays during the week (late August 1967) about which I am now writing. All that means is that with this being essay # 2029, 2029 weeks ago would have been near the end of August 1967. That was the week (ten days actually) in which my family (mom, dad and four boys--ages 16-7) drove across the country from CT to CA to start a new life. Though it happened 39 years ago, some of the events of that move are as vivid in my mind as anything that happened yesterday. This and the next essay tell that story and why the move bulks so large in my family's and my self-definition.

A Little Background

I was born in 1952, the second of four boys, to Frederick and Jean Long. My father's family hailed from upstate New York where they had settled in a forbidding region north of Utica in the 1830s after coming to this country from Germany. Memories last long in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. When I visited a few surviving relatives there in 1997 my aunt told me the sad story of the "flu of '68'" that claimed three of my relatives. Only thing is, she was talking about 1868 and not 1968. My father's family lived on a farm, ekeing out a fairly impecunious existence from the hardscrabble and unforgiving soil for more than a century before he was "rescued" from this tedium by World War II. After the War he attended and graduated from St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, where he met my mother. They were married in 1948 when it seemed, I am sure, as if the whole world was getting married.

My mother, in contrast, was the product of a prosperous Connecticut town and a family of middling means in that town. Her father owned a laundry in Stamford, CT, and she and her younger brother attended the grade school which I eventually attended in Connecticut. It was called Holmes School. I proudly told nonplussed hearers on later occasions that I was one of the first "Holmes-Schooled" kids in modern America. Unlike my father's family, my mother's people, on her mother's side, trace their origin at least as far back as 1639, when one of her "Urvaters" helped found the town of Stratford, CT. Maybe my interest in the Bard, who himself made another Stratford his home, is secretly driven by a desire to find myself pleasing to the memory of (Sgt.) Francis Nichols, my Puritan forbear.

In any case, my parents were married on December 26, 1948 in Union Memorial Church, Glenbrook, CT. The church was a small Congregational Church tucked into that town between Stamford and Darien, and the church had been pastored for 50 years by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Evers, my mother's great uncle. I knew Dr. Evers when I was a boy and when he was in his late 80s and early 90s. Everyone called him "Uncle Evers" though I hastened to point out to people with pride that he was actually my real uncle.

My parents took up residence after their marriage first in Jersey City, NY, where my older brother was born and then, shortly before my birth, in Darien, CT. I spent my first fifteen years in that town, enjoying educational and social opportunities not available to many other people simply because my parents wanted to give us boys as much help as they could as we launched into the big world. In order to allow us the life we lived (in the poorer end of a very wealthy town), my father commuted daily for more than 15 years to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company on 1 Madison Avenue, NYC, where his work had nothing to do with selling insurance and everything to do with thinking about ways that something called the computer might be useful in the future. He used to regale me with stories of the Univac computers, the marvel of the age, which took up one city block, and could calculate numbers at an amazingly fast pace. Someday, my father told me, computers would fit inside of our living room. I think he was only referring to the future size of computers, rather than their physical placement in the home, but I like to interpret these words as prophetic of the role that computers grew to play in our society after his early death in 1981.

Ah Yes, The Trip

In the summer of 1967 my father was transferred from the NYC to the San Francisco branch of Metropolitan Life. I never really knew how high up he was in the organization, but I knew that the higher up in the company he went, the more he felt he was in the religious minority (Protestant. Metropolitan Life had a predominantly Catholic upper echelon). And, lest we be too lovey-dovey and modern in our thinking, those religious divisions meant quite a bit in the 1950s and early 1960s in NYC and the Connecticut suburbs. I still remember summer potluck dinners at the home of some of his bosses in wealthy Conn. suburbs where we were serenaded to various Irish tunes (Londonderry Air, for example) by the boss. I am afraid that a good strong Protestant response of a hearty chorus of "Arm, Arm Ye Brave" might not have been greeted with misty eyes.

So, dad was transferred to San Francisco in August 1967. The problem was, however, that we had just bought a house in a pricier section of Darien earlier that summer, and were all set to move into our classic home on Old Parish Road when the order came to move. I recall mowing the lawn at the new house repeatedly in the summer; I thought it highly unfair that we would have to sell the house when I had put all that time into making sure that the grass was cut and we had not even moved in.

And so we packed up our 1967 Ford Station Wagon, Connecticut plate 603 909, loaded the four boys in the car with four suitcases stuck in the luggage rack above, and began our trip across the country. I don't recall precisely which day we left or which day we arrived. I think we arrived in CA on Saturday, September 2, 1967, which would have meant that we left CT on Thursday, August 24. It might actually have been the case that we left a few days later. I recall wanting to go to school on the first day, which I think was Tuesday Sept. 5, but my mother had to register us for school on that date and we didn't begin until the next day. It was the first day of school I had missed in years.

The next essay tells about some of our trip.

2029