Thursday November 25, 2004 – Trip to Puerto Rico Circa 1955

Thursday November 25, 2004 – Trip to Puerto Rico Circa 1955

My father and mother spent most of their early lives together moving from one military base to another. I remember our first big move, which happened in the summer of 1955. The Army had transferred my dad from Ft Bliss, next to El Paso, Texas to Camp Losey near the town of Ponce, on the central southern coast of Puerto Rico. I had just completed fourth grade at Travis Elementary School in El Paso—the school is still teaching kids this many years later in the same place, between Lincoln and Hayes Avenues on North Stevens Street. Our furniture and household belongings were loaded up in a moving van for the journey overland to New York and from there to Puerto Rico. We would arrive well ahead of it.

My parents, my three younger sisters and I were loaded into my dad’s 1951 Oldsmobile—sans seat belts and we began the trip east, stopping briefly at my grandmother’s place in Brooklyn, where we spent a couple of days with Aunt Letha, who died mysteriously in 1972 just shy of her 100th birthday—her gravestone shows a birth date of September 1879, though her true age she kept secret. In 1955, she was 74 years old but she had the will and physical stamina of a woman half her age. She had her own place nearby grandma’s house but she would inhabit both places as the mood struck her.

Though Aunt Letha had kin in and around Brooklyn she lived alone except for her dog and a few farm animals. She was my father’s only remaining relative on his mother’s side. And he had a loving fondness for her, as did my mother, who had come to love and admire this noble woman, with eyes that fixed you in her gaze and a verbal patter that had a chant-like quality. I remember her cooking for us and being mistress of the manor when we came to visit. I’m sure she loved the company of so many people in the house after being alone in the intervals between our visits. Our family tradition was to spend Christmas in Mississippi and she looked forward to our arrival.

From Mississippi, we drove on to New York where we were to board a Military Sea Transport Ship that would take us to Puerto Rico from the Brooklyn Naval Yard. We were not well off and my father had banked on having accommodations at the guesthouse at the Army receiving station at the shipyard. When we arrived there were no vacancies until the following day so we had to fend for ourselves in the big city for the night. Most of the hotels where the Army suggested we stay were well out of our modest budget, so we found a place on Staten Island to camp out in the Oldsmobile overnight. The following day we checked into the Army guesthouse.

A couple of days later we boarded the military transport and began our journey to Puerto Rico, which took a couple of days. On board the ship were many other military families all making the trip, some going to Camp Losey and others to Ft Buchanan on the northern coast of the island near San Juan. Military kids make friends fast, realizing that you may or may not see one another again. Being around kids your age going through the same sense of displacement you were experiencing tended to ease the strain, especially when they seemed to be having the time of their lives and you were feeling miserable. There was this lovely blond girl about my age whom I became very attached to during the trip and I was heartbroken when we had to go our separate ways at the end of the voyage.

When we arrived in Puerto Rico, I remember a long bus ride across the island from San Juan to Ponce. It was a slow trip that meandered through forested areas lush with vegetation and mountainous stretches that seemed to take forever to traverse. When we arrived, my father found a hotel in Ponce that was in our price range—how they managed to pay for the cost of providing room and board for us is a mystery to me. I suspect the Army provided us with a cash allowance to pay for travel expenses. My father and mother have a way of befriending people and we were soon very familiar with the hotel’s owner and his family. They spoke enough English and my mother spoke enough Spanish that we were able to get along quite well. My dad would report to the base during the day and we were left to play in the hotel room and the lobby area. The hotel was above a print shop and my sisters and I would watch the workings of the shop as a pastime.

It took a week or so for us to find a house that my father rented in a suburb of Ponce. It was adjacent to an enormous sugarcane field. Our Oldsmobile had finally caught up to us and my father drove us to our new home, sans furniture, as it had not caught up to us yet. We had been living out of suitcases for several weeks with my mother somehow managing to keep us in clean clothes. We had arrived in the latter part of the summer and my sisters and I were left with time on our hands and a new place to explore. My sisters and I got to know the neighbor kids and we had quite a few adventures learning about life in a land where English was the second language. The cane field provided an endless playground as well as a source of crawfish, which older neighborhood kids would catch in nets in the irrigation pipes that watered the crop.

Each day, there would be a vendor selling fresh baked loaves of bread, one of my favorite memories of that time. Buttered bread and warm milk mixed with coffee along with cereal and we were ready for the day. There was a grocery store a few blocks from where we lived where I would go for milk and eggs and other staples. My mother did most of her grocery shopping on Camp Losey where the prices were much lower and the selection larger.

By the time the school year began, we eventually got housing on Camp Losey and were once again living among an English speaking community. The change was like night and day. The neighborhood in Ponce was uniquely Puerto Rican. The base was any small town community in 1955 America.