UNCLE DAN Chapter 2

Ship Yards
Courtesy photobucket.com

 

We left North Carolina and came down to Tennessee to visit the home folks before we headed to California. After a couple of days we journeyed west and were on a time schedule for my dad had to report to work in a week. I had traveled all around the South with my mom and dad because of the nature of his employment.  He worked for a company that sold and installed textile machines and he did trouble shooting should there be a problem. Now at last he had a job in a mill where we could stay in one place.

Time passed, and then came WW2 and everything changed. Thousands of people from the South came west to work in the shipyards and aircraft factories.  Several of my relatives arrived in California a couple of years before the war and my father got them jobs in the cotton mill where he was employed.

Uncle Dan came after the war started and gained employment in the ship yard. I can't say people went completely crazy but they were on a money high.

They went from almost no pay to making sixty dollars or more a week. You could work as many hours and days as you wanted.

I don't know exactly how to say this but there were many single women working that had never worked before, and a good man was hard to find in those days due to so many men sent overseas.  Morals were loose and it was like a smorgasbord for adultery and fornication.

Uncle Dan had come to California alone leaving his wife in Tennessee promising to send for her when he got settled.  After several months she began to suspect that he had been caught up in the debauchery and finally gave him an ultimatum either send for her and her son or she was going to get a divorce.  He had been promising to send her money to come to be with him but he kept putting it off.

 

Someone may have clued her in about what was going on, but I never was sure about that. The fact was he had taken up with a woman who worked in the shipyard and by this time she was pregnant.

This was the dilemma he found himself in and finally he decided to stay with his wife and told the girlfriend they were done. She was quite broken up about that and pretty well felt betrayed for she didn't even know about his wife at first.  

 

There was another man who was crazy about her and wanted to marry her and after some time she consented even though she didn't love him.  He took the child as his own and helped raise her. I always thought she was a nice woman even though she got caught up in a bad situation. Years later I saw the daughter she bore and the girl was almost the spitting image of one of uncle Dan's other daughters.

When his wife arrived and all the truth came out she laid out a whole list of; "Thou shalt nots" to which he agreed. Some fifteen years later the girlfriend divorced her husband and contacted my uncle.  I didn't want to know anything about that so I never asked any questions about it.  I don't think anything came of it or I would have heard without asking.    

 

To be Continued - - Next; after the war was over - -

This post is linked with Jennifer at:  God-Bumps and God-Incidences