All the children started school. Julia and Peter went to the same school, but Deborah had to go to Junior High. She hated every minute of it. Moving around did have its effects on the children. While they were in school, I got a part time job in a hairdresser’s. The lady that owned it was English. Julia got really sick. The school was right alongside Lake Ontario and the winds came right over the lake. The winters were very bad. I had not learned to drive then so we had to walk to school in the cold.
After a while we moved from the apartment to a three bedroom town house next door to the Sanderson’s. They were from the North of England. It was nice to have some friends that understood us. We have corresponded all these years. They are back in England now. We moved to another town house as the one we were in was next to the garbage disposal, and with very hot weather it didn’t work out. It was on Prospect Street. I decided to go to hairdressing school. Harry worked for an agency that covered the Steel Company of Canada. He worked for three really nice men, but the pay was poor, and Harry didn’t get a raise. Consequently, I thought of opening a hairdressing place of my own. Well, after going to school from 8 a.m. – 6p.m., leaving the children alone, I discovered I was having a baby, ten years after the last one. I was thirty-eight, Deborah fifteen, Julia thirteen, and Peter nine.
Olive pregnant with David
Meanwhile, Harry read an advert for a job in the USA for the big aircraft company, Boeing. He phoned up and the two men said, “Send us your resume as we are just returning to Seattle.” It was some ten months later, when I was seven months pregnant, that he received an offer of $12,000 a year, which was much more than he was getting at the advertising agency. We had to go through a lot of procedures, but were soon on our way.
In November, 1967, we packed up all our stuff with a moving company and we stayed one last night with the Sandersons, who were very upset to see us go. It took us six days driving to reach Seattle. We went through ten states, and each was different. We were all very lonely and wondered if we were doing the right thing. The first night in a motel, I thought I was in labor but it stopped, thank goodness. We used to leave each day at 8 a.m. and drive until 4 p.m. in the evening. When we first arrived in Puget Sound we stayed in a motel in Renton – escorted by a friendly policeman on a motorcycle.
We had managed to rent a house through the services of a Christian man we knew in Hamilton. It was really hard going. I had to make curtains for big windows. The girls used to go with Harry to the laundromat to do my washing because the house didn’t come with a washer and dryer. When we’d been there a few days, I found a baby doctor and got fixed up, so on January 5th, 1968, little David Robert George arrived. He was a beautiful baby, 8 lbs., 13 oz. Peter was thrilled that he had a little brother.
David as a newborn
Peter (right) with David as a newborn
David and Peter
We saved as much as we could and ate hamburgers all the time, and when David was eleven months we bought a beautiful new house in Kingsgate. Harry left Boeing to work for a medical company, and doubled his salary. I learned to drive and he bought me this lovely bright red convertible Mustang.
Olive with David