Junction City

 

We bought a little second hand red Toyota sedan, packed up everything we owned into the smallest U-Haul trailer and set out for Kansas, only to arrive and find out there wasn't any place to rent because the army was bringing so many people to Fort Riley that some families were camping at the lake. We went door to door knocking and asking if they had an apartment or room to rent. Finally, late that night we found a man who said he had an apartment he could rent us, but not for a few days. He agreed to put all our stuff in his storage shed if we paid him a month's rent, about $65 I think. That meant we could return the U-Haul, but we still needed to find a place to spend the night. 

We didn't have any camping gear and all the motels were full, so we kept driving east towards Illinois and finally found one room just outside of Manhattan, Kansas. It had four double beds, but the manager said if we promised to only sleep in one of them we could rent it as a single room. We were exhausted and grateful. I remember waking up all night long wondering if he was going to rent those other beds to other people. He didn't. The next morning we drove back to Illinois and stayed with my parents until the apartment was available.

It was an old two story house behind the landlord's house. We went in the back door to the kitchen and the only other rooms were the old dining room which was now our bedroom and a bathroom that had a brown wooden shelf built into the wall for toiletries. The people who shared the house told us where to put things so neither of us could peek into the other's bathroom through the pinholes in that shelving. It was a bare bones apartment with paper curtains over a box closet in the kitchen and all the windows. A bare bulb hung in the middle of the kitchen ceiling. There was an old gas stove that I had to light with a match and an oil stove in the bedroom for heat. I was afraid of lighting matches so my husband gave me a long rod that could hold one match when I lit the stove. One day the match blew out and I didn't turn off the gas while I got another one.  As I lit that match the whole room flashed around me and there was an awful smell. Later when I looked in the mirror my eyebrows looked funny. When I brushed them, they fell off. I had burned them, my eye lashes, and the fringes of my bangs right off!

Our bed was up against some old fashioned pocket doors dividing our apartment from the adjoining one. We did not think about this the first night when we went to bed as a newly married couple in our first home together. The next morning the girl who shared the house with us laughingly told us about all the banging our bed made on their side of their living room door. I was so embarrassed, but most of the couples around us were newlyweds. I remember hanging laundry on the shared clothesline and hearing people making love in their bedrooms around me.

Money was tight and we only had one car which he had to use to get to work very early every morning, so I tried washing clothes in our bathtub. I aso spit shined his uniform dress shoes by using a piece of cotton dipped in water and shoe polish until I could see my face in the shoes. Anything so that the time we had together wasn't spent doing chores. The army had lots of rules and sayings. One of them was, "If the army wanted you to have a wife they would have issued you a wife." That meant mess up and they will require you to move back into the barracks!

I wasn't working so I had lots of time. The girl next door and I became friends and she put some eggs on to boil for tuna salad while we walked to the grocery store to buy a can of tuna. When we came home something smelled terrible before we even opened the door to her apartment. The eggs had boiled dry and exploded all over her wall!

I polished the windows, bought a plastic lamp shade I could screw on over the kitchen light bulb and I cooked. I bought a clear round plastic cake box so I could make a pie and display it on top of the refrigerator like they did in cartoons. Then I made a butterscotch meringue pie like Grandma used to make me and put it in the box. I felt like the perfect homemaker! Imagine my surprise when I went to get it after dinner and discovered the heat from the refrigerator had melted all the meringue. 

I had learned to cook by cooking for our family of six growing up and helping the nursing home cook cook for forty. My husband would come home to a huge plate of pork chops, a bowl brimming over with mashed potatoes, a basket of hot dinner rolls, and a big bowl of vegetables. No one in his family ever ate more than one piece of meat and small portions of other food, but they did eat dessert almost every day. I loved the idea of dessert and made all sorts of things, including caramel dumplings which was a recipe his Scottish grandmother passed down to his dad, who taught me how to make them. Eventually he began bringing home his bachelor friends to share our food.

For entertainment we would play Putt Putt Golf at night or go see movies like Oliver. Sometimes we would go to the NCO club for dinner or dancing, but I always had to dance with friends. Once in a while I just danced with another guy's wife! And then there were places like The Rogues Inn. They sold 3/2 beer because you had to belong to a club to sell real beer and they had live bands singing things like Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay, or I Could Put Time In A Bottle. They also sang homemade songs like "Never let your dingledonger dangle in the dirt" when they drank out of their four foot stein.

We were happy, but we only lived here for about a month. It was a distinctly army town and once when I was downtown alone, a guy called me over to his car to ask directions. When I got there he tried to pull me into his car. Luckily my neighbor's husband saw us and intervened. 

Gas was about twenty eight cents a gallon and we would drive out of our way to save a few cents, but we were actively looking for a new apartment. Eventually we found a place in Manhattan, Kansas and it was time to move.