Chapter 10, Back To Europe

Shortly after my return from England, my parents decided to move to Southern California, to a small town named Sunnymead, just outside of Riverside. I helped them with the move and stayed a few days with them and was introduced to my future wife, Gail Johnson who was living next door to their new home on Starcrest Drive. I then returned to Sacramento and stayed at my job for a while longer. My brother Kenneth, who had just been released from the military, was living with me. It was only about a year before I decided that I was in a dead end job and headed nowhere, so I decided to join the military. I quit my job and joined my parents in Sunnymead, where I was reintroduced to Gail. I enlisted with the U.S. Air Force, and Gail and I dated for a couple of months before I was called for induction.

I soon found myself in Texas, at Lackland AFB for basic training, and then to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi for electronics school.

I was going to be an ATC Radar Maintenance person. Gail and her mom came to see me while I was at Keesler

and we spent much time together while I was home on leave after my initial training. By this time we had decided to be married.  We were married in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1966 after I had completed my basic training and was home on leave before going to my first duty assignment in Sembach, Germany.

Gail joined me in Germany and we had the opportunity to visit much of Europe at the time.

We went to Paris, France and saw all the usual tourist traps, The Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, we dined on the sidewalks of the “Avenue des Champs-Elysees” and visited the Louvre’. We took a delightful train ride through the Alps on our way to visit Rome, Italy, wherein we purchased cheese, bread, and wine from the window of our train car at each of the stops the train made. In Rome we saw the Trevi Fountain, made famous by the movie “Three Coins in a Fountain” and the song with the same name. We visited the Colliseum unattended, and I have a piece of it to this day on my mantle. While we were in Italy, we took a side trip to visit Pompeii, the ancient town that was buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Pompeii is one of the most interesting places I’ve ever seen. We were also able to make a short stop in Pisa, to see the famous leaning tower. Again, we entered unattended and climbed the spiral staircase all the way to the top. I don’t think that is allowed anymore. Near Pisa, was a small town with a very large marble factory and we purchased many of the items we still have in our home today.

We could not leave Germany without a cruise down the Rhine River to view the beautiful “Cliffs of Lorelei,” and that is one of the last things we did during our stay. We were in Germany for about a year and a half before I was reassigned to Griffith AFB in Rome, New York. We spent an uneventful year in New York before I was discharged in September of 1968, Just a couple of months before “Woodstock” took place in that same vicinity. We drove our brand new 1968 Ford Mustang across country, stopping in Oklahoma to visit Gail’s relatives on the way. By October we were back in California to discover that the Hippy movement was in full swing.

                            Gail on the left, Robert on the right
Everyone we knew was smoking marijuana and advocating the “Peace” movement. There was a strong movement against the war in Viet Nam, and against the military in general. We fell in with my sisters Lily and Sandra, and their crowds, and struggled our way through the hippy generation that saw many of our friends lost to drugs and worse. It seemed like none of them realized that they would, one day, have to return to reality, get jobs, and start making lives for themselves. They thought they would be peace-loving hippies for the rest of their lives.

I attended Riverside City College during this time and walked away with an associates degree before my G.I. benefits ran out and I had to go to work. Gail and I bought a couple of homes during the next decade, with the last one being on Bay Avenue in Moreno Valley. This is where we raised our family and spent the next 15 years or so until we purchased our present abode in Riverside in December of 1998. In 2001, I finally realized my lifelong goal of completing my education at the University of Redlands, almost thirty years after I started at the Riverside City College. I graduated with a bachelor's degree 1 year after my daughter Carey had done the same.