Just before we let Houston, Ann discovered that she needed to have surgery. Naturally that produced quite a bit of anxiety on our part. We had to delay our leaving by a week. I got somewhat disturbed when Ann was being wheeled down to surgery. She said, “If it turns out to be major, I want Mama to raise Elliott.” That didn’t exactly encourage me. As things turned out it was benign, and we headed for New York a few days after she left the hospital. When we got to Tennessee she took her own stitches out. She figured she was a nurse and had surgical experience so she didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t do it Of course it was crazy but we were 27 and didn’t know any better.
We spent our first night in Texarkana not knowing that the rodeo was in town. A storm had just passed through and the rodeo performance was canceled. It seemed like all the rodeo riders were staying at our hotel, and by midnight most of them were drunk. We suffered through noise all night long. The next day we drove no farther than Memphis. Interstate highways were not highly developed at that time. We stayed at a motel on the bank of the Mississippi River. Someone in the room above us was apparently having a fight. After awhile, one of them must have won. We heard a thud and after that there was silence. We got some sleep that night. While we were there, we visited the Union Avenue church in Memphis. Frank and Della Pack, two of my college mentors, were visiting. He was in the process of moving from Abilene to Los Angeles, where he would chair the religion department at Pepperdine. He had family in Memphis, so he was spending time with them before moving to the West Coast.
The next day we drove to Portland, Tennessee and spent the night with Ann’s cousin. That would be our last contact with family for awhile.
From there we drove onto Mansfield, Ohio. I know it sounds like we weren’t making much progress, but roads were much different then. The road from Nashville to Louisville was two lane, and mountainous with switch backs. When we got to Cincinnati, we had to drive through the middle of town (no freeways) at rush hour. We drove by Crosley Field, the old Cincinnati baseball park, which was being torn down, to be replaced by a “modern” Riverfront stadium. Now Riverfront is gone, so we have lived through an entire era.
As we entered Ohio, we realized we had crossed the Mason-Dixon line for the first time in our lives. We had never been that far north even to visit, and yet we were planning to go there to make our home. Actually that’s not totally accurate. Back in her race car days, Ann had attended the Indianapolis 500. It’s good we were young, we might not have been all that gung ho had we been older.
From Mansfield we drove on north. At noon, we stopped to eat lunch at a roadside park near Cleveland. I got out the picnic baskets and went back to the car. Ann said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m getting my jacket.” The weather had definitely changed. We then drove on into New York State. Although Jamestown wasn’t on our route, I just had to go by there and see the place that would eventually become our home. We left Jamestown and drove on to Hamburg, New York, where we spent the night with John and Marilyn Featherstone. We had worked together at Camp Sunset in Texas. Camp Sunset had done a big good bye event for us. We all cried when camp ended. John and Marilyn said good bye to us, but as things turned out, they moved to New York before we did, and they were the first to welcome us there. On our first night in New York, the temperature dropped to 26. Just a week earlier we had seen 100 degree temperatures in Houston.
The next day we attended a church service at Niagara Falls, and we saw the Falls for the first time. We were duly impressed, and that would be the first of many visits to the famous honeymoon destination. It seems like we made a trip to the Falls every time someone from Texas dropped by to see us. That night we met with the Hamburg church, which was meeting in a rented hall. It was also a new church plant. On Monday we drove on to Albany where we would spend the next nine months.
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