K Street, San Diego

San Diego, California on K Street

Life after marriage was different but not that much different. Since Lee and I were still in the Navy we still had to spend time doing our jobs and standing duty when our turn for it came around. We only had one car and our apartment was a long ways from the base, plus I still didn’t know how to drive. Of this that meant the frequently I had to stay at the barracks when Lee had night duty so that I could get to my job the next day. And it happened about twice a week. After a few months of this it got very old and I was very unhappy in my job. I went to my commander and told her I was pregnant and she started the paperwork to get me out of the Navy. At that time no woman could stay in if they were pregnant or on drugs. In no time I was out of the Navy and playing housewife as I had been brought up to think that being a good wife and mother were the most important things in the world for a woman to do.
Now I spent lots of time at our apartment while Lee was at work on the ship which was fine except that I was frequently lonely. I wanted a pet. Lee was agreeable to that but we had an upstairs apartment so we both agreed that it wouldn’t be a good life for a dog as we didn’t want to have to be going in and out in the middle of the night, and there was no kind of yard to keep it in. We agreed to get a cat.
A look at the ads in the San Diego paper resulted in an ad about kittens for sale that were part Siamese and part bobcat. Bobcat? Now that was interesting. We called for directions and drove out to the edge of a small town near San Diego. The owner explained how they raised Siamese show cats but had found a wild cat kitten that they thought was part bobcat as bobcats were frequently seen in the area. He was in kept in a very large special cage near the house and he did look like a bobcat with a long tail. If he was really part bobcat no on knew for sure. The cats’ owner had bred him to a couple of his Siamese cats and had two large litters of kittens that he was trying to sell for the low price of $5 each. All the kittens from this cross were either black or bobcat-like tabby. I wanted one of the tabbies, and Lee chose one of the black kittens. We got both of them.
Once we had the kittens home we discovered they were both covered with fleas. A bath was needed and quickly if we didn’t want fleas on us, our bed, and all over the apartment. The kittens survived leaving their mom, and their first bath. They thrived on the cat food we fed them and grew quickly. We named the tabby female La Tigra and called her Tiggy and the black male Nuisance. The kittens were a wonderful addition to our lives. We loved them, and enjoyed playing with them. They were housecats so they were never allowed outside. We never thought to take them in for shots or spaying and neutering as we should have. So after about eight months we noticed that our kittens were going to have kittens. This was exciting. A few weeks later Tiggy had four kittens. Two were black and two were tabbies. We decided to keep one tabby kitten and one would go to Millie the woman who lived underneath our apartment and who was a sort of a friend.
Another of the sailors on the ship with Lee was Rick Turnage. We had become good friends with Rick and his wife Kay. They wanted one of the black kittens and another couple Gene and Barb O’Loughlin wanted the other one. But it was not to be. The kittens all came down with distemper and died. The only reason that we could think of the Tiggy and Nuisance didn’t get the distemper was that the man who had raised them had given them their shots before we took them.
Gary Bullion was sent to Viet Nam with in a week after we were married and Jim Jansky who was best man at our wedding got out of the Navy not long after we were married and went back to his home in North Dakota. We wrote letters for a few years but have lost contact now. We spent a lot of our time in San Diego with our friends Rick and Kay or with Gene and Barb. I still correspond with Barb from time to time through email. Rick and Kay went back to Memphis, TN after Rick got out of the Navy and later divorced and I now have no idea where they are.
While in San Diego most of our or I should say Lee’s spare time was spent either at the Lighthouse or the bar playing pool. Lee and I loved to play pool as swore that if we ever had a chance we would have a pool table in our home. It couldn’t be in the little apartment we had so we spent many an hour somewhere there was a public pool table. Other times we spent time walking on the beach. Night time was our favorite. There would be very few people there and we would walk out on the pier to watch the tide either come in or go out. It was relaxing and calming. Other times we just drove, and drove and drove. Didn’t matter where we were going as long as we were going.
In October of 1971 almost a year after we were married Lee was transferred to the Great Lakes Illinois base for three months of training in his navel field of Engineer. We packed and somehow managed to get everything of importance into our Mercury Cyclone car including the two cats and headed for Silver City, NM for a weeks visit with my family.