Cooper (our home town) was not what we had left just a few short years before, he found. Most of the friends we had known there had gone elsewhere. It didn’t take him long to decide he didn’t want to go back to Texas either, so he packed up my mother and brought her back with him.

I had gotten a promotion to Fashions Receiving while he was gone, with a little bit more pay and work that was a lot more fun.

Millions of veterans had been released from the military when the war was over and there were very few jobs. Basil pounded the streets like all the others were doing. They would be just about to put him on when they would say “Oh,by the way, what branch of service were you in?” The next question was “Were you wounded?” When they found out he had been, they no longer were interested in hiring him.

Some of them even had the brass to say “The Government takes care of all you boys who were hurt in the war.” Sure they did! Basil drew $44 a month for his 40% disability. This was not much compensation for being wounded twice.
Once he was blown about 15 feet backward by a Japanese hand grenade. He got up not even realizing he had been injured and proceeded to come at the enemy from another direction. This time he advanced within about 15 feet to where the four Japanese soldiers were and demanded they surrender.
Instead they suddenly began shooting point blank, hitting him numerous times. He returned fire until he ran out of ammunition. Shortly he was hit in the back and fell for the last time. It was not long until his buddies came to help and he was off to the field hospital. For this he was paid the sum of $44.00 per month

Basil Found A Job

Bank of America had a training program under the GI Bill of Rights, but they only paid $90 a month, hardly enough to keep a family of four going. The GI Bill only paid that much too and we couldn’t afford a college education at those rates.

Basil even went to re-enlist in the Marines, but they told him he would be sent to China and would have to give up his disability status. He wasn’t willing to do either. He was standing on the Post Office steps wondering what to do next when a guy he’d known in the Marines stopped to talk. Basil told him he was having trouble finding work and he said “Go in there, they’ll hire anybody.” Basil was hired, to go to work the next day. That was in April, three years, almost to the day, from when he had gone on active duty in the Marines. It seems hardly possible that so much could have happened in those three years to have changed our lives so much. The world we came back to was not the world we left. It was a strange new place.

Basil worked extremely long hours, sometimes seven days a week at the Post Office. The overtime came in handy, though. There was no such thing as time-and-a-half for overtime at the Post Office for substitute employees (which was Basil’s designation) then.

We took the twins to the Zoo, went to Presidio Park for picnics, and visited friends for recreation. Dorine and R. D. Wright had moved back from Texas to Chula Vista and we played a lot of cards. We also visited the Rushings, friends we came to know during the war.

We had two strollers for the twins (twin strollers hadn’t been invented yet) and we pushed those strollers everywhere. Our only modes of travel then were city buses and “Shank’s Mare” (walking).

We acquired a black and white dog that year and named him Frisky. Wherever the twins were, Frisky was there, too. One day the twins (about 18 months old) got away from my mother and a man brought them back. He said the twins were walking down the sidewalk along a very busy street and Frisky was walking down the gutter beside them, between them and the busy street traffic. We were lucky that time, thanks to Frisky.

Sometime that spring one of the guys I worked with at Wards told me he had a car for sale. It was a gray 1938 Chevrolet and in very good shape. He wanted $850 for the car, never mind that it had sold new for $500 or $600. Some friends of ours paid $1250 for a Dodge of the same vintage, so we got a pretty good price. No cars were made during the War, and suddenly millions of veterans wanted a car. Factories were not back to full production, either, so used car prices were pretty high.

Besides dropping the bomb to end the War, President Truman did another good thing--he kept price controls in effect. I shudder to think what the inflation rate would have been, had he not.

Our New Home

In early 1947, one of the ladies I worked with at Wards told me she and her husband were going to buy a new house. She wanted us to come out and look at it. So we bundled up the twins and drove to Lemon Grove to see the house. And loved it. We looked at the models and put down a deposit on a two-bedroom, one-bath house. We moved in April, and lived just around the corner from my friend from Wards.

New houses didn’t come with landscaping in those days. Dorine and R. D. would come over on weekends and Basil and R. D. put in a lawn. Other landscaping waited until we had the money to put it in. The house cost $7600, with no money down on a GI Loan, and the payments were $53 a month. Older men who worked with Basil thought we were crazy to go into debt that much. I had bought some War Bonds during the War. and we used those to buy the absolute essentials--stove, dining table and chairs, sofa and chair. We already had the beds for the twins, a refrigerator--I got the first refrigerator that came into Wards, a desk, a sewing machine (I made most of my clothes and some of the twinsÂ’ those days) and washing machine. The sofa made into a bed and we thought we could sleep on that until we could afford a bed. That happened quickly--sleeping on that couch was for the birds! The house had more closets than I had ever seen, so we made out okay.

Our First Vacation

We took our first trip to Texas that year. Mama went with us, but decided to stay in Texas. I decided I would stay home and take care of the twins. Counting the twins, there were eight little boys in the neighborhood, all about the same age. Roger Pickens, Paul Martin, David Carpenter, Pete Byrne, Gary Bostwick and Ronnie and Donnie. They all played together all the time, not always happily.

My dad, C. E. Stunkard with our twin sons, 1947 .

They usually played in our back yard, because I wanted to know where the twins were. One day I looked out the back door and Frisky, our dog, had Gary Bostwick by the diaper and pushed him next door to where Roger lived. Gary had been hitting one of the twins on the head, and Frisky decided to escort him out of the yard. None of us had fences around our places--that was an expense which could wait.

In November, 1947, I made fruit cake for the first time. I baked the cakes in one pound coffee cans. The twins always slept in the same bed. They had gone down for their afternoon nap when the cakes came out of the oven. Each cake weighed about 1-1/4 pounds. Our kitchen wasn’t all that roomy, so I put the cakes to cool in the empty crib.
I finally realized the twins were sleeping a lot longer than usual and went to check on them. They were in the crib with the fruitcakes. They had finished off two cakes and were well gone on the third. It scared me, I just knew I would be up all night with sick babies. Except they didn’t get sick. and Don loves fruit cake to this day.

In 1948, Basil joined the Post Office Post of the American Legion. Nothing would do but for me to join the Auxiliary. I have never been a joiner, and I knew absolutely nothing about the Legion or Auxiliary. The people were very nice. We took the twins with us to meetings (baby sitters cost 25 to 50 cents an hour!). Most of the membership was older than we were, and they delighted in the kids.
Come Memorial Day in May and we were introduced to selling poppies—again, the boys were with me when I was selling. The American Legion red crepe paper poppies are put together by veterans in hospitals—we furnished the materials and paid them somewhere close to a dime for each one they made. Any profit above the cost was used by our Unit’s Rehabilitation Fund, to help veterans and their families.
Did you know that when a Veteran is hospitalized, his disability pension stops until he is released? I don’t know what the families are supposed to live on, especially in cases of long periods of hospitalization. Ronnie, Donnie and I sold poppies every Memorial Day from then on.

We went to Texas that summer, and coming home we had all kinds of car problems, including a burned out generator. A mechanic in Amarillo wanted an arm and a leg to put a used one in. Basil said “No thanks,we’ll just do it when we get home.” The mechanic laughed and said we’d never make it,but we did.
On our way across West Texas, we bought two huge watermelons—they grow them big in Texas! As we drove across country Basil and I discussed whether or not the border inspectors would let us take them into California.
When we got to the inspection station in Blythe, the inspector walked up to the car and asked if we had any fresh fruit or vegetables in the car. Ronnie and Donnie hopped out of the seat and straddled the watermelons on the floor and, in unison, said “You’re not going to take our watermelons!” The inspector laughed and said “I don’t want your watermelons, boys!” They had heard our discussions coming across country and were ready to Protect their property.

The Twins, Ronald and Donald

In September, 1949, Roger and Paul started to kindergarten, along with Pam Byrne. So we had fewer little boys to keep up with in the neighborhood. I was pregnant again with, hopefully, a baby girl.

Cross-country Trip

In November, we started out on a long journey. We had bought a 1941 Oldsmobile. Our first stop was Salt Lake City, Utah, to visit Glen Young and his mother. Glen had been in 1st JASCO with Basil.
We had bought new denim jackets and jeans, decorated with studs, for the boys. They were four years old. Mrs. Young was a wonderful cook, and she just loved to feed little boys. When we left home those jeans were big on the boys, but it was a week after we left Mrs. Young’s before I could button those jeans.
If there was one thing those boys loved to do, it was to eat. They had their own little table and chairs at home, and they would push their milk glasses together to make sure one didn’t have more than the other.

When we left the Youngs’ we headed toward Golden, Colorado, to visit Dale and Coila York, another couple of Marine Corps friends. It started snowing and when we got to Rabbit Ears Pass, they were stopping everyone without chains. Chains? It had not occurred to us that we would need them. The officer said it would be just as dangerous for us to go back as to go on, so he let us go.
The snow was falling so fast, it was like a funnel in our headlights. We passed an eighteen-wheeler wrapped around a pine tree, but we just kept going. We finally reached the Yorks’ late that night. This was my first experience with high altitude cooking; it took forever for Coila to just boil potatoes. I still don’t understand it, our California mountains are higher than Denver, but cooking is not affected by the altitude here.

We stayed a few days with Dale and Coila, then headed for Thorntown, Indiana, where Lynn and Nova Putman lived. Lynn was another Marine buddy from the war. Kansas was one long stretch of wide-open spaces.
Lynn was working for the railroad, but he got a few days off and we decided to take a trip. We went south from Indianapolis through Kentucky and Tennessee. The forests were in full fall color and were gorgeous. We were a little cramped for space, with four adults and two kids in Lynn’s little Renault car.

We crossed the Cumberland River just above the Cumberland Falls. There was no bridge across the river, we drove onto a flat vessel, which was the ferry. It pulled us across the river, using a V-8 engine. We visited the Cumberland Falls State Park, which was brand new at the time.
When it came time to stop, we were in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Lynn and Nova took one of the twins in their room at the motel, and we kept the other. All night long we were either freezing or burning up. I would get up and change the raise the amount of heat if we were cold, or cut it down if we were hot. The next morning, we found out that Lynn and Nova had been doing the same thing all night. It seems the thermostat in our room controlled the temperature in theirs while the thermostat in their room controlled our temperature!

We turned back north and Lynn said he found a shortcut on the map, State Highway 69 in North Carolina. And some shortcut it was, too! The paved road soon turned into a dirt road along the side of the mountains. There were some beautiful views from up there, but there were big holes in the middle of the road with poles in them to warn you not to drive into one. We had seven flats on that stretch of road.
We stopped at a service station somewhere up there in the mountains and Lynn had to jump out of the car to stop the attendant from putting gasoline in the radiator. They had never seen one of those little foreign cars, and had no idea where the gas tank was. Lynn was forever teased about his “shortcuts” after that.

We got back to Thorntown via Cincinnati, where we crossed the Ohio River over a toll bridge, only to find out there was a free one about a block away. We had traveled 1,111 miles when we got back to Thorntown. When it was time for us to leave Nova decided to go with us to Paris, Texas, to visit her mother.
So we took off again. Nova wanted to help drive and was driving through Missouri. Those state highways were so narrow, there was hardly room for two cars to pass. During the middle of the night, she slammed on the brakes. Basil and I woke up with the car surrounded by horses. I donÂ’t know what they were doing loose on the highway, but we narrowly avoided hitting one or more of them.

The rest of the trip was fairly normal, aside from my meeting a truck on a narrow bridge out of Texarkana. We went to Oklahoma to visit Zella and Jerry Holland, who had been neighbors in Frontier Homes, and to Muskogee to visit Goldie and Cliff Walden, who had been neighbors in the trailer park. We have relatives all over Texas, so we were gone quite a while that trip.

We were home for Christmas, 1949. Glen and Mrs. Young sent the twins two beautiful toy firetrucks for Christmas, which thrilled the boys no end. And that was the end of that eventful decade, the 1940’s.

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