First Marriage, Honeymoon and the Kluin’s Extended Family
When I wasn’t at the Jersey shore for the summer, but back north in Union, NJ, I spent a lot of my time alone. I only had a few close friends and since my parents were quite a bit older, they didn’t have relatives close by with kids my age. I didn’t have the opportunity to associate with anyone close to my peer group at family outings and parties. In fact, we didn’t have any family outings or parties.
Joann, on the other hand, had a relatively large group of relatives and extended family. On weekends, they would all get together at one another’s houses for dinners and parties and, as her steady boyfriend, I was invited to join in. It seemed that practically every weekend there would be an invitation at either Joann’s home or at one of her uncles or cousins or other relatives or friends of relative’s nearby.
We would all gather for an informal dinner accompanied with spirited conversation on current events and more often than not this would be followed by a friendly poker game among the men. It was generally five-card draw with nickel, dime quarter limit on the bets. I never had the opportunity to play poker before and so it was a new and interesting experience for me. And since I was an only child with a small family, I had never experienced the comradery that these informal family affairs offered. I enjoyed it immensely.
Over a period of a few years Joann and I became a steady couple and increasingly became active participants in all of the families’ informal parties as well as weddings, birthday parties, and other miscellaneous excuses to get together and party. Beer and wine were always available and flowed freely unlike at my home where alcohol consumption was generally frowned upon. Although social drinking was discouraged by my Father, he always had a few bottles of whiskey stashed around in secret hiding places in the basement, garage and attic where Mom wouldn’t necessarily look. And I could understand her concern over the booze because once he started nipping at it, he would eventually get pretty autocratic and ornery. So, on balance, inclusion in the Kluin family social circle was a pleasant respite from sitting at home watching reruns of “I Love Lucy” on TV with my folks.
This was also during my last year of high school and beginning of my first job at Heller Machine and Tool and the atmosphere on the home front wasn’t very easy-going. I kind of merged into the Kluin’s extended family before I was actually part of the family. This continued until I was twenty-three and Joann was twenty-two and it became a foregone conclusion that we would get married and raise a family. I didn’t actually propose to Joann in the formal sense, but we just started planning our wedding together. It was time. We were married on May 27, 1967 in Roselle, New Jersey in the Catholic Church Joann attended throughout her youth.
“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” Socrates
Communion, Protestant versus Catholic (Confession)
I believe the rule has now been revised but back then because I wasn’t a Catholic we couldn’t be married on the alter like a Catholic couple but rather exchanged our vows in the pit down below in front of the alter. I wasn’t a very religious guy, so it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. The wedding reception was held at a local hall that specialized in such affairs and overall, it was a pleasant experience. No arguments or fights or brawls took place and I believe a good time was had by most if not all.
Aruba Honeymoon
Joann planned our honeymoon and actually did a good job. She found a great deal on a trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba. Aruba has since become a featured vacation destination and I understand it now has numerous hotels, casinos and all-inclusive resorts. But in 1967, it was off the beaten path. There was only one hotel on the island, The Aruba Caribbean Resort. So, we spent the week at the Aruba Caribbean.
It was a great hotel right on the beach with a nice restaurant and attached casino. We booked the all-inclusive package which included all our meals and entertainment. It was first class. But after three days lounging on the beach every day, eating in the same restaurant every night, playing the slots in the casino every night, listening to the same female singer, good as she was, every night became a little tedious. I think the fourth night when she ended her routine with the same song, Guantanamera, Joann and I just looked at each other and broke out laughing. The next day we signed up for a guided tour of the island more to break up the routine than anything else.
The island is small, six miles wide and nineteen miles long, so the tour wasn’t very extensive but still a welcome break from just lounging on the beach in front of the hotel. Besides, by this time, I actually had sun poisoning from laying out in the extremely intense sun. It was the first time in my life I ever got sun poisoning. Since the time when I was a small child I always tanned immediately. My Mom would always say you’re brown as a berry at the beginning of the summer when after one day in the sun I was already tanned. So, when I was out in the sun in Aruba, I never gave it a second thought. What I didn’t realize how intense the sun could be that close to the equator. Especially since in Aruba where there is a constant wind from the East, the trade wind, that makes the intense heat bearable. Joann was smart, she covered up. But I was the big Macho Man and just stayed out there on the beach and baked. It was time for a break in the routine and a chance to give my bright red blistered back a break, so we signed up for the tour.
The tour bus was a small mini-bus or van, if you will, and the tour guide was a local guy from the island, nicely dressed, articulate, knowledgeable and friendly. He appeared to be of mixed race as were many natives of the island. He had Caucasian features but was a sort of medium brown skin color. As I recall the tourists were comprised of four couples, including Joann and I. One was a black couple from the US. After the bus left the hotel in the town of Oranjestad, we proceeded toward the other end of the island and passed through the small town of Sint Nicolas.
The tour guide warned us that if we were to rent a car and take a trip around the island on our own, we should bypass Sint Nicolas and not stop there under any circumstances. One of the couples spoke up and asked, “Why not?” The guide then told us, “Blacks, because of the blacks. That town is where the blacks live, and they cause a lot of trouble.” The same couple then asked somewhat incredulously, “Blacks, what Blacks?” He answered as if it should have been obvious, “Haitians, the black Haitians, the blacks”. Here we are on a small island in the middle of nowhere populated by a handful of people all of them of mixed race and we had some racial strife going on.
Years later I experienced the same thing in Brazil, a country of mixed race people where nearly everyone is of mixed race and there was a distinction among them based on relative percentages of European and African heritage and they would make a distinction based on bloodline to the nearest one-sixteenth. Wow. So, on the guide’s advice, we didn’t return to Sint Nicolas. But I was wondering at the time what the black couple from the US thought about his comments.
The high point of the tour was the shark feeding station on the west side of the island. The water on the west side is always a rough as a consequence of the trade winds that constantly blow. There was a cove there where everyone including the resort hotel staff took their garbage to be dumped in the ocean. The garbage attracts sharks and we were cautioned to never go in the sea on that side of the island and particularly near that cove. We happened to be there during the garbage dump, and you could see the shark fins churning the water. They were well trained.
First Apartment
When we returned from our honeymoon, Joann and I rented an apartment near Oak Tree Road in Edison, New Jersey on the second floor of a relatively new apartment complex called Trafalgar Gardens. I was working at Lockheed Aircraft in Edison and the apartment offered a convenient commute to and from work. It was a one-bedroom garden apartment (not sure what they meant by that as there were no gardens around the place). Nevertheless, it was a nice area and a nice apartment; an auspicious start.
Edison, New Jersey was undergoing a transition at that time evolving from a rural to a suburban area. Trafalgar Gardens was on the very outskirts of the suburban zone and directly behind the apartment was an open field interspersed with open fields, trees, and a small creek. It offered a great view from our second story deck and a certain degree of seclusion.
Located in the field behind the apartment was a collection of barns and outbuildings. The collection of buildings was part of a horse auction called Roosevelt Sales and Stables. The outfit was run by a guy named Louis (Bunchie) Grant and the stables were referred to simply as Bunchie’s. Auctions were held every Wednesday night and we could hear the auctioneer from the deck at the rear of our apartment.
We would frequently wander over to Bunchie’s and observe the goings- on. We would sit high up in the bleachers and watch the “cowboys” run the horses fore and back below as the auctioneer prattled on with his chant. Matter of fact I enjoyed the chant as much as watching the horses. It was an evening of exciting free entertainment. “Ok, Boys, open the gate, let’em in.” The gate would fly open and the rider would run the length of the building at full gallop spin around and run em back again. It also was the first time I was around horses up close and personal. I would often wander around outside the auction house to the stables and investigate the livestock and chat with the “cowboys”. I didn’t imagine at the time that later on I was to become a lot more up close and personal with the equine species.
I believe we stayed in the apartment for about two years, and it was at that time I started to contemplate switching from night school to a full-time day student. Joann was working a steady job at the Bell Telephone Company and between her salary, our meager savings, and the option of scholarships and student loans I reasoned I could switch to a full-time student and obtain my Bachelor’s degree, before going bust.
Things at Lockheed were also not looking very promising. The space program was winding down, layoffs in the industry were already taking place and it was only a matter of time before I would have to find another job. I applied to NCE as a full-time student and resigned from my position at Lockheed.
When I resigned and told my boss Tom (Snake Hips) Brennen that I was resigning to go to school full time he motioned over his shoulder at the engineering department and said, “What are going to do, become one of these guys?” I said, “Yeah, I hope so.” He responded, “Best of luck kid, you’re a damned good machinist and I know you’ll make a damned good engineer.”
Joann was pregnant, with Jill, at that time and in hindsight the prudent course would probably have been to stay put but nothing ventured nothing gained so we moved ahead with the plan.
The second apartment
A year after I started as a full-time student, I had enough credits to graduate but lacked two required courses. Nevertheless, I applied for a full-time position and was fortunate to get a job as a junior process engineer with The Lummus Company, a major engineering contractor in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Lummus had a tuition refund plan and the two courses I took after work at night were paid for by the company. I actually graduated with the class of 1970.
During that first year while working at Lummus my daughter, Jill, was born. We were quite cramped in the one-bedroom apartment at Trafalgar Gardens. We needed to find a larger apartment, a two bedroom, one for us and one for our daughter Jill. Joann soon found a place not far from where we were. It was a two-bedroom apartment above a detached garage at a private residence. It looked good, it was on several acres out in the country, and was very affordable. So, we took it and moved in. It turned out to be a huge mistake.
The landlord who lived in the house next to the garage had a couple of sons in their late teens or early twenties and basically, they were New Jersey “rednecks”. The sons were involved with building hot rods in a shed out back of the house and frequently they and their buddies would be revving up engines, peeling out and just making a general ruckus oftentimes until one or two in the morning.
The apartment was heated electrically with space heaters about two feet tall built in the wall just about the height of a toddler. On cold winter nights when the heat was turned up, they were red hot and a major hazard especially for Jill. If she accidently bumped or fell into one of them, she would have been severely burned. The living room walls of the apartment were also covered with faux wood panels made of flammable plastic. Clearly this was a disaster waiting to happen. In addition, late one night the rednecks working on their hot rods set the shed on fire. It was quite a blaze. No one was hurt but the shed and the cars inside were burned to the ground. That was it. We needed to get the hell out of there, ASAP.
Moving in with the Kluins
Options were limited and so we took up an offer from my in-laws to move into their house in Colonia, NJ (next town over). It was a relatively small but nice house in a quiet neighborhood. It had a partially finished basement, so we moved in and set up housekeeping.
Financial issues were also in play. Joann and I were in complete agreement that she should leave her job throughout her pregnancy and become a stay at home mom as soon as I was employed by Lummus. I would do that again, it was the right decision. However, finances were very tight. My starting salary at Lummus was the same as the salary I was making when I left Lockheed to attend school full time, $10,000 per year. But now circumstances were different. Joann’s salary was missed, savings were depleted, and I was faced with repayment of student loans I had taken for tuition. Thus, the offer to move into with the Kluins had definite financial benefits. It also allowed my in-laws, Herman and Helen, to participate in the first years with their new grandchild, and Joann and I had a babysitter for Jill when needed.
But in hindsight it also had some major drawbacks. This was a time for Joann and I to become full partners in life, raising our daughter, making our own decisions together and generally making our way in the world. But family decisions now involved four people instead of two. And since I was working full time, with a long commute and travelling on business as well I became less than a full partner in this family. It started innocently enough but escalated over time and in hindsight was a major factor that eventually led to our inevitable separation and divorce.
So long, good luck and have a nice day…
Long Story Short: A Collection of Stories by Hal Gunardson 