It Takes Two for This Tango
When Bob proposed to his second wife, Alice, her father
said, “You realize that you could end up living anywhere in the world, don’t
you?”
His first wife, Ann, had died of cancer and a wife and mother was needed for his two boys.
Alice was quite beautiful and had children of her own. They became a blended
family.
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| Bob and Alice's blended family |
Bob loved foreign languages and when I married him, he spoke
French, German, and a little Italian. He’d gone to France on a Fulbright
Scholarship right after graduation from Princeton University where he had
helped a professor translate a philosophy text for him. He had fallen in love
with Ann, “Miss Southwestern”, and she had applied for the Fulbright scholarship and urged him
to apply. She didn’t get it but he did, they married and off they went to Europe for a
honeymoon, where he wrote his paper, and they traveled all over.
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| Bob and Ann on the Queen Mary 1952 |
Bob served during the Korean War in Germany. While married to Ann, they lived in Newcastle, England while
he worked for Proctor and Gamble. Bob also worked for Holiday Inns,
International Division, and traveled all over the world for them. That was a
little frustrating for him because, he said, “When I woke up, since all the
rooms looked the same, I wasn’t sure whether I was in Germany or France or
somewhere else.”
Bob, the Princeton philosophy major, discovered he truly
believed in the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
and this ended his marriage to Alice who was Catholic. Not long after this our friends introduced us even though he lived in Tennessee and I lived in Southern
California.
Bob told me the story about what his second wife’s father
said about ending up living anywhere in the world. Quite frankly, I told him, I’m
more worried about being bored living in one place for too long.
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| Bob and Bev August 23, 1979 |
In college, my Master’s Thesis advisor, G. Ray Kerciu, was
having trouble getting a sufficient number of people signed up, for a 6 week painting
and drawing course in Mexico. He said that if I got 20 people enrolled, I could
go free. Sounded like a winner to me, so I did just that. The tour called for two
weeks in Guadalajara, two weeks in Puebla and two weeks in Mexico City, and
that’s where I was when the first steps were taken on the moon.
After college, I became the Director for the Downey Museum
of Art in Southern California. The City of Downey’s Sister City was
Guadalajara, Mexico!!! So of course, I went with tours down there and set up
exchange exhibitions for artists in our museum.
After our marriage in the Washington D.C. temple we lived in
Arkansas and Nashville, TN. The International bug bit again and Bob got a job
as IT Director with Johnson Control World Services on the Island of Kwajalein,
an Army base in the Marshall Islands. We lived there for five years or so until Johnson Controls lost the contract to Raytheon and all the top managment positions were being replaced. At
this point retirement loomed on the horizon because at 65 and the peak of his
earning career, Bob could not find employment. We started talking about where we
would like to spend our retirement years. Our household belongings were in storage in Nashville and our 1200lbs from Kwaj were being shipped to San Francisco to be stored until we decided where we would end up.
We went to Southern California to stay with my mother who
was not doing well living alone, and absolutely did not want to go into a
Senior Citizen home. We had an eight year old daughter, who we had home
schooled, but had to attend 3rd grade while in California due to
education laws there. When she came home from school saying she didn’t have to read except
for half an hour, that did it. Prior
to this she’d spend hours reading whole series of books.
Bob suggested we could retire in Saudi Arabia, or maybe
Greece, where he could add another language to his repertoire. He’d already
learned Russian, attempted Japanese, and had a little Marshallese under his belt by this
time. I dug in my heels and said, “No.” to these suggestions. I said, “How
about New Zealand?” He replied, “They speak English there.” What about the
beautiful mountains? “I’ve seen the real Alps.” They have sheep and the Māori who
are the Tangata Whenua, an indigenous people, of New Zealand, I countered. “They
have British food which is horrible, because I lived there and know it well.”
Bob said, “I want to go where they speak a foreign language,
eat foreign food, the signs are in another language and the landscape is
totally different from anything I’ve ever experienced.”
“What about Mexico?” I said. After a little research at the
library, he came back saying, that Mexico was probably the most foreign place you
could go that was easily accessable to the U.S. Having experienced Mexico City, I told him, I’d only
agree if we could live in Guadalajara. And that began the process of paperwork,
visas, etc. everything in quadruplicate because there would be four of us. All
of the paperwork had to be in two languages, English and Spanish. (Hey, Bob,
you liking this yet?) We had to get inoculations, a bank account where we could
draw out money in Mexico, a post office address that would forward mail to us
down there (bills still needed to be paid) and arrange for household goods and
our car to get down there too.
I have no sympathy for illegal immigrants. Mexico had many
restrictions on our Visas. We could not work there or take a job from a native
person. That limited us to teaching English or practicing one of the arts, like
writing, painting and drawing, music, photography, sculpture etc. We had to
jump through a thousand hoops, it seemed. And we had to renew our visas every
year.
Finally we went down there on a scouting-it out trip. We
stayed at the hotel I stayed in when in college.
Bob loved it. We had a deal.
