In those days the telephone business was still growing very rapidly. In 1948 I was offered a job in AT&T headquarters, but I had to move to New York, so we did.

We did an unusual thing. Instead of selling a house, we found a family in New York City who wanted to live in Washington. These people took our house in Chevy Chase, and we took their house in New York. We would just use one another’s home. Our contract stipulated what would happen if one family had a change of plans.

Well sure enough, six months later a job opened up in Washington. So I called the other fellow and told him what happened. He told me that his family wasn’t very happy in Washington. He asked if I would pay is moving expenses Back to New York which amounted to about $300.00.

The next day we worked out a deal and soon we were back into our respective homes without any problems. I worked in Washington until 1950 than I was offered another job in New York in the same corporate headquarters. So we moved back to New York, but this time we knew something about the city. We sold our house in Washington and bought a house in Manhasset New York, where we lived for 25 years.


Children

Our daughter Fay was born during the time we lived in Washington. My son Jim came eleven years after his oldest sister.

Carol went to nursery school in long island city. When we moved back to New York she was then old enough to go to kindergarten.

The reason we chose Manhasset was that we thought they had the best schools of anywhere around the New York system.

About this time we had a telephone strike so I had to delay the move. In the meantime the guy who sold me the house in Manhasset changed his mind. For some reason he decided not to move to the West Coast.

I got a call from a broker telling me that the guy wanted his house back. In the meantime the fellow changed his mind again. After the house was bought, and not bought, it finally got bought again.

The house was built by Leavitt a big builder before the war who built classical houses. When his boys came back from the service Leavitt Became a really big – time builder. There was Levittown, long island, Levittown Pennsylvania, and other communities. These were all modern house is usually built on slabs without basements.

So we loved that house.

From 1950 through 1955 I worked in the company headquarters. Then I got offered a job working in the long lines department of AT&T, which operates all over the country. I took the job but I didn’t have to move because the long lines headquarters were in a different part of the same building in New York.

After working there for about two years I got transferred to Cincinnati. Well moving to Cincinnati was a big thing for Andree. They didn’t know the country; they thought there were Indians out west!

Well, we moved to Cincinnati, but when it was time to move back to New York they liked it so much they didn’t want to leave.

When we moved to Cincinnati we rented a powerhouse in Manhasset; we didn’t sell it. We moved back into our own house. That’s why we owned it for 25 years. Jimmy was born just after we moved back to Manhasset.

The girls were in junior high or high school, and they were delighted to have a little baby brother.

Then AT&T long lines decided to move its headquarters from downtown New York to New Jersey, somewhere near Morristown. That would have meant a two hour commute for me. This was 1976 and I was old enough to retire but I was working in a job that I was very fond of. I didn’t want to retire

Jimmy at this time was in college which made it economically undesirable to retire.


We Bought the Farm…Literally

So we sold the house in Manhasset and bought a farm in New Jersey!

It was a 27 acre farm with a 100 year old farmhouse. It was a charming place and it was near enough to commute to our new company headquarters in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Andree wanted to live in New York City in an apartment but I didn’t want to. A farm seemed like a good compromise. We grew Christmas trees and heavy twelve acre alfalfa field. The prior owner was an airline pilot who had a farmer take care of the fields.

It was just like Green Acres, the TV show. For five years, from 1976 through 1981, we live there. Then, I was 65, and I had to retire.

About this time, all my kids were moving to Boston. We thought we might like to have a place down to the ocean so we looked at a small town called Saltaire. But we decided it was too far from Boston and where our kids were living, so we bought a piece of land on Martha’s Vineyard. We built a house there.

One of my secret ambitions had been to build my own house. I’ve satisfied that ambition and no longer have it. In the meantime I’ve built several homes for Faye practically from scratch. I like to come out here and help Fay, and keep busy.

When I retired in 1980 we had a home on Martha’s Vineyard where I intended to retire. And, we had the farm because we needed a place to live. We decided to keep them both. We kept the farm for another five years and then we really did farm it.


My Life is all About Serendipity

There were quite a few trees on the place that were fully grown, and I was selling them. There’s a funny story about this.

Many farmers in this area raised Christmas trees. The neighbor across the road from me has a home right next to the Airport. He had a tennis court and a swimming pool, and of course I loved tennis. He liked to have someone using his tennis court because it showed signs of life. He offered me free use of the court during weekdays. I was having a great time working in the garden playing tennis cutting the grass, and working with the trees.

One day I came home from tennis and I saw a guy digging trees. He was digging the same kind of trees that I had that we’re getting awfully big. I stopped and asked if he was buying them and wanted any more he told me sure.

He came and looked at my trees, we agreed on a price, and he said that he would take 100 of them. He came over into them up and left them in my front driveway for a day.

The next day a car drove up and a guy got out and started looking around at the trees. He told me that he was from the state agricultural department and that these trees were going to be sent to Canada. He was there to inspect the trees and make sure they were healthy. He passed the trees.

He told me that the Canadians were building roads and wanted these kinds of very hardy trees to landscape there highways. The Canadians were buying them wherever they could get them.

The guy asked me if I was the Mr man and I told him know that I had just retired.

He told me that if I wanted to become a nurse room and that he would take care of the paperwork but that he would have to come once a year and inspect my trees. He would do all this for free.

A year later I received a book of state nurserymen, and there I was listed as a grower. I always thought that would come in handy if I needed it for income tax purposes but I never needed it.

Just about everything in my life happened this way. Pure serendipity.