Trips to and from California Part Two

On another trip to California, my shore duty was over in 1972 and I was aboard the USS Enterprise for several months. The ship was due to return to San Diego in early 1973 so I called Joyce, who was back in Missouri, and told her to buy a new car and drive to San Diego and get us an apartment on Coronado. Our 1969 Dodge was not terribly reliable. She did not feel comfortable buying a new car by herself, so she took the Dodge to a local mechanic to tune up the car and safety check it. She was driving through New Mexico when she could not keep the car under control. She pulled into a station there and the mechanic put the car on a lift to check underneath. The front shock absorber had lost its seal and had leaked out the fluid, making the car hard to handle.

She made it to Coronado, but the car was running poorly. When I arrived I looked under the hood and found the mechanic in Missouri had failed to put the distributer cap back on properly and the rotor had cut through the connections to the eight sparkplugs and it was a miracle that she was able to drive the car that far without a breakdown.

We headed back to California in 1977 in a Ford Torino station wagon I had bought. The upper radiator hose broke going through Texas and we had to stop to have it replaced. We stopped in Las Cruces, New Mexico the next night and when we started the car on a Sunday morning, the alternator failed. There was no way to get it fixed on a Sunday, so I drove from Las Cruces to Tucson with no heater, no radio just to conserve our battery. We went to the first garage we saw by the motel to have the alternator replaced. We did not have enough cash left to pay for the job, so the garage owner kept Joyce and our daughter Annie while I went to a local bank to cash a check. The bank did not want to cash an out of state check until I paid for them to call our Missouri back to ensure funds were available. We made it over the mountains in California and were headed down on the west side of them when I started to hear a whining sound from the back of the car. By this time we were nearly broke, so I just drove on and hoped and prayed whatever was going wrong would last until I had a job. I went to an employment agency and they referred me to Burroughs Computer Company. I was half way up the hill to the company for an interview, when the rear axle on the drive wheel slid out and made the car roll to a dead stop. I walked back down the hill to a garage to have them pick up and tow the car in for repair. Lucky for me I was able to walk back up the hill for the interview and get the job.

We left California in 1987. Joyce left before I did and was at the helm of our Ford LTD and when she got to Texas she pulled into a station to refuel and the attendant looked at the tires and said they were showing steel radial belts through her tires and they needed to be replaced. She thought she may have been taken, but did not know. She bought a set of tires there to continue on to Missouri, as she should have done. The tires they sold her were crap and did not last 20,000 miles in an age when tires lasted 60,000 or more miles.