Walter at ages 1, 20 and current (I'm not telling)

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I came into being May 6, 1925 in Fort Wayne, Indiana - the second of three boys. The depression and hard times that followed stripped Mom and Dad of most of their worldly posessions. I remember one Christmas when there were no presents under the tree - but we were warm and we had something to eat.

I have many pleasant boyhood memories of the Indiana days - trips to the icehouse with my brother and our red wagon to buy ice - going to the dairy to buy a gallon of milk in a bucket for 5 cents - eating fresh vegetables from our back yard garden.

It was a great day for our family when Dad got his WW-I veterns bonus and was able to buy a 1931 Model A Ford sedan. Our family horizons expanded greatly - evening rides ending at a drive-in for ice cream or a root beer float. And trips on the week-end to one of the many lakes in Indiana to enjoy playing and swimming in the cool crystal clear water.

Steady work was hard to find in Indiana, so Dad applied for a Civel Service Job in Dayton, Ohio. He was accepted as a patternmaker at Wright Patternson AFB, so we rented a moving van, loaded everything we had into it and moved. It was hard on all of us because we knew no one in Dayton.

We no sooner were settled when Dad was transfered to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. So we sold everything we could and loaded what was left into our 1931 Ford. We headed to Wilmington, Delaware to moved in with Dad's Mother. With the regular income, Dad was able to buy a 1936 Buick sedan. We were also able to move into a house again.

WW-II war clouds were gathering, so I enlisted in the Navy V-5 program upon graduation from high school - following in my older brothers footsteps. Although he earned his Navy wings of gold as a Marine pilot and was flying combat missions, the war ended as I earned my wings of gold in the Navy.

I attended the University of Delaware under the G. I. Bill of Rights and graduated with a Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1949. While taking a break from my studies (by taking a Sunday ride with the family), I ran into one of the twins my buddy and I dated before the war.- at Lenope Park in Pennslyvania. To make a long story short, we were married in 1948 while I was still in school. We found a two room apartment in a private home. Kathryn took the bus North into Wilmington to her job as a legal stenographer, and I thumbed a ride South to the University of Delaware in Newark.

Upon graduation, I found a job in Seattle, Washington - a company called Boeing. We bought a 1936 second hand Chevrolet and made it to Seattle without incident over lonely two lane roads that went through every city and berg on the way. We started our new life in the great Northwest when our first born arrived just after we moved into our new home in 1950.

After 10 years at Boeing and three years at Thiokol Chemical Company in Brigham City, Utah, we packed up again and moved first to Huntsville Alabama for six months then to New Orleans to work on a new program to get men to the moon - the Saturn V. Although this was the bright part of my engineering carrier, the family life in New Orleans was not to our liking, so we transferred back to Seattle to raise our family in the environment and living conditions we knew and enjoyed.

After the kids finished school , we transferred to the Cape - on the same program that I had been working on in Seattle. Retirement was approaching so we wanted to see if Florida was the place we wanted to settle in for the rest of our lives. It was. We are still here - in our Condo on the beach in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

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