When you’re in the military and moving around a lot you count that as your travel. It’s not that much fun.

My husband did all the driving on trips. He didn’t trust anyone else to drive. He just wanted to get there. Lori mourns the fact that we have passed through the Grand Canyon area five or six times and she has never seen it.

I don’t mind flying unless there is a kid on the plane who makes a lot of noise.

I liked Japan a lot. I taught English there, well, I wasn’t really teaching it. We had classes where college students would come to the home and practice their conversation. That was very interesting. They were very kind to us and would invite us to their home.

We got very close to one family. They were very wealthy people and the man had been a manufacturer of uniforms. He made all the uniforms for the Japanese navy. It was interesting because he was supplying the enemy and yet we became very friendly. Their home was quite beautiful in the Japanese style. We went there several times.

The college kids I was teaching were a lot of fun. The sister university to theirs was Stanford. I was fascinated by how well educated they are. They start speaking English right from the very beginning. They have many different teachers, foreigners such as British or Americans, and their language followed the accent of their teacher. I had one kid they called Tex because his teacher had been from Texas and this Japanese kid had a big Texas drawl!

Assaulted by Autograph Hounds

Lori loved the Japanese kids and they were very good to her. They called her “Rolly.”

Our first house in Japan had a big park behind it. Our backyard went right up to the park fence. The Japanese love flowers, of course, and they grow very well there. They had a big field of iris in this park and there were hundreds and hundreds of Japanese there, all taking pictures of this field of iris. Then they would take pictures of one another. Pictures of everything. Lori says that there are hundreds and hundreds of homes in Japan with pictures of her. They always wanted to take a picture of a little blond kid.

One time we were strolling through a park in central Tokyo and all these young kids kept coming up and asking us for autographs. We were really flattered. We found out later that it was a class assignment. One of my students told me later that their teacher had given the assignment to go talk to an American. The only way they could prove they had talked to an American was to get their autographs. It was the first time I had been assaulted by autograph hounds!