Young Adult

When the war was over…

Americans flocked back home to rebuild their lives and to rebuild the nation. Many didn’t return.

I had finished high school in Crescent City, California, and gone on to a small liberal arts college in Oregon. My father had somehow managed to set up a small scholarship fund for both my brother and me. But I also had to work two jobs in the summer to save enough money to go to university.

All my life, I had longed to travel. First inspired by books that my father had read to my brother and me when we were young and then by articles in the National Geographic Magazine. I had a strong desire to see other parts of the nation and the world; yet at that age, the farthest I could think of traveling was to go back east. In fact, I wanted to go all the way back east so I could step across the Nevada state line.

During Christmas vacation, I got the chance to travel by hitchhiking north across Washington state to the Canadian border, and then east across Idaho and into Montana. It was winter and extremely cold. There was snow everywhere, and I had inadequate clothing. Soon after I arrived in Montana, I crossed the road and began my return to the relatively moderate climate near Portland, Oregon.

After my first year, there was a massive strike in the Pacific Northwest that closed down all of the logging and milling operations. There were no jobs to be found. I joined the Air Force counting on the benefits of the G.I. Bill of rights to help pay my way through university.

When I joined the Air Force, they gave me three choices, food service, military police or information services. I envisioned four years of scrubbing pots and pans, four years of marching up and down guarding planes on the flight line, or four years of telling people where to go and how to get there. I chose information services.

Information services turned out to be a lot more than telling people where to go. I dealt with the press, wrote press releases and articles, edited base newspapers and began taking photographs to illustrate the articles I wrote.

After completing my service with the Air Force, I enrolled in journalism school at the University of Missouri. There, I met my advisor, professor Cliff Edom, a man whose book I had studied while working on the base newspaper at Ramey Air Force Base, in Puerto Rico.