Cool Timeline
Japan 1952
We lived on a military base, part of the American occupation of Japan after WW II.
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It’s the end of the summer, about time to leave Hawaii. When we lived in Hawaii, it was not a State. It became a state on August 21, 1959.
I have other pictures with the Japanese nanny. My faint recollection is that my mother lived was living a life without hard work, problems or worries on this closed military base. She had servants for the children, and a busy social agenda. Sandy was getting old enough to look after her brothers, something she did for the next 10 years. Many of my childhood memories are of Sandy, and not of my mother.
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In Hawaii, I remember we spent a lot of time on the beach and in the water. As the picture shows, she was my security.
The 3 of us, grouped together in the yard of our home at Hickam AFB, Honolulu. Sandy is 11 years old now.
Few American children today have such an open face. At the same time, this social life that my mother loved, was beginning to unravel the family.
Here she is about one year with her grandmother, I think in the State of Nebraska.
Still in Nebraska, where dad was stationed at an Air Force base for flight training.
In California with grandmother Rhea and Bob, at “the Cabin.” Located in “Little Green Valley” in California.
This is probably the summer before I was born, when the family was moving to Novato, California, where I was born.
In Novato California, I think dad is already in Japan. I am about one year old, and soon we will take a boat to Japan via Hawaii. Apparently, flying was not an option.
Sandy is in 3rd grade, 8 years old.
This is a stopover in Hawaii. Elsewhere I have pictures of our time on the boat.
Although we lived on a US military base, we had some connection with local Japanese culture.
After leaving California, the next stop in a US state is McLean, Virginia. The McLean Virginia of 1957 and the McLean Virginia of 2018 are two different worlds. To illustrate, across the road from our house was a farm. There was no DC “beltway”. A large wooded area existed between our home and McLean High School (where Sandy and I both graduated HS). Where there was farms and woods, there are houses on a 1/4 acre plot. Because of the beltway and DC expansion, what used to be “deep rural” is now part of the greater DC area.
Our childhood leaves a lifelong imprint on our characters.