Many of us moved away from our home town to attend school, work, or whatever. The steel mill was nearly closed in 1950 when I graduated and the railroad was hardly hiring. I went to Columbus and got my first post high school job at the D.L. Auld company. It paid $0.78 per hour for a nine hour day, six days a week. I moved the stamped metal parts (Car emblems and appliance emblems) among various departments. Such parts were used all over the world by manufacturers. After stamping the steel emblems were chromium plated and buffed to fish before shipping.
My brother-in-law, James Dexter White, Joan's husband, helped me get a job at Columbus Coated Fabrics at $1.00 an hour shortly afterwards. After only working and sleeping in Columbus and going home and spending my little earnings on dates with Jeanette Weddington, I decided to return home and join the Navy as my slightly older friends, Don Ramsey and Paul Stamm had recently done. That required a four year enlistment during that time of the Korean War and, after talking with a few of my WW II friends, I found that not many of them had served the entire duration of the four plus years of WW II. The Army was drafting for only two years and I felt that would be enough time away from Jeanie and home. We married in January, 1952 and I was drafted in November for duty beginning on my twentieth birthday, November 13, 1952. In the meantime, I obtained a job in the shipping room of Williams Shoe Company and we set up housekeeping in furnished apartments.
After service in Japan, I returned and we lived in Forest Heights and eventually bought a house at 2114 High Street in Portsmouth. Our son, Jay, was born there and we lived there until January, 1959, when he was three. I was working then at Goodyear Atomic Corporation, mainly as a metallurgical technician in the Metallurgy Department. I resigned and matriculated to the University of Kentucky (December, 1958) and the three of us moved to Lexington, KY. I had been attending Ohio University's Portsmouth Branch for six years to obtain 1 1/2 years of engineering credit. Not a lot of engineering courses were offered at the branch and I had to recruit enough students to obtain most of my classes so that professors from Marshall U or Ohio U in Athens would make the trip to teach us.
After obtaining my Bachelor of Science in Metallurgical Engineering, we moved back to Portsmouth and GAT re-hired me for the Metallurgy Department. After short abodes in Forest Heights and Kent Street apartments, we bought a house in Eden Park from a friend, Dave Spriggs, Jim's older brother. We lived there six years until I was hired by the Abex Corporation, Denison Division as their Division Metallurgist. We moved to Westerville in July, 1967 and have lived in this same house for nearly forty-one years now.
I played only intramural sports at PHS, but began playing Church League basketball and softball when I was sixteen. We attended Central Christian Church and had some very fine softball teams there. I played some industrial fast pitch in Columbus for an American Welding tteam with a few other Denison employees. By that time it was nearly all slow pitch in Columbus. I began fast pitch Church league play and slow pitch n Westerville not long after.
Dad had died of a massive heart attack during my first semester at UK. Mom and the younger kids were still at home on McConnell Ave. and we made frequent trips down Rt. 23 to home.
We were out of Portsmouth, but Portsmouth was not out of us while living in Westerville. Jay, then twelve, would have preferred to go back and live with my mother and Jeff, only six, didn't appreciate the too frequent trips back home. As the boys became more involved in Westerville sports activities we slowly weaned ourselves away from P'Town. Jay longed nostalgically, to be in Portsmouth and, wanted, hopefully, to eventually play for the Trojans. Instead he became a good ball player of the main sports in Westerville and, through the help of Dick Klitch became a late walk-on at Miami University of Ohio.
I will continue with this at a later time, but hopefully the draw of Portsmouth to me and my family will have been established by this introduction.
