Pictures that go with Grampa's notes to Yun,Sean,& Chey

Here are the pictures that go with the notes I sent to my grandkids on Oct 15.

Love GG

Portraits II

Ok, I was wrong. The passport photos in the last post were replacement photos we had taken in Samoa in September or October of 1973. They are replacement photos because our passports burned with everything else we owned in the house the Government of American Samoa had assigned to us.

Here's how that went:

We arrived in Samoa after a couple of days in Hawaii--we didn't know any better so we stayed in a high-rise hotel on Waikiki. Cam and Jean Beatty met us as our assigned hosts and took us to an 8-plex apartment complex in jungle for the night after hosting us for dinner in their house in a nice suburban neighborhood full of white people like us. The next day they took us to the big New Zealander grocery store in town where we bought a car--we signed a note and then sent a letter to the Alpine Credit Union asking for a loan (the check came in a couple of weeks). Once we had the car we went to GAS housing office and negotiated ourselves (with a little help from new friends) into a house in their neighborhood. Then we settled in--unpacking our air shipment of goods and our suitcases and buying things like a washer and dryer from other white people who were leaving the island.

Soon it was time to go to an orientation for all the new teachers who had been hired that year by the Department of Education. We sat in a culture class all morning, in preparation for being taken to a remote village for an overnight stay and a chance to go native. But someone came in and called us and Ted & Mogie out--because one of us had a house on fire in Tafuna. We rode back to the neighborhood--about 10 miles--in a pickup truck, with Ted and me in the back, each admitting to the other that we hoped the burning house was the other guy's. But it was ours. And we lost everything. Some church friends put us up until we got assigned a new house, got in touch with our parents through a HAM radio guy to get them to send us necessities, and started over again.

So here are the real first passport pictures. You now can see us before and after the burning of the house. From the fire we learned a lot--believe it or not, to simplify.

In the spring before we went to Samoa Kristi got married and the reception was at our house--my parents' house then, of course. We were pretty stylish before Samoa.

I went to Samoa thinking I was going to make it as a fiction writer, but when I got there I found out that I was scheduled to teach high school English--mostly ESL. (What's ESL, we asked? English as a Second Language, they answered). By the end of the first year I had lost interest in writing--it turned me into kind of a jerk who kept shooing Linda out of the room so I could concentrate on my art, and I decided I liked teaching. Someone took a picture of me teaching at about that time.

One more thing: it took me awhile to figure it out, sometimes the leaking is caused not by a bad diving mask but a bad moustache.

Portraits

In our 39th year of marriage we are finally starting to go through the thousands of photos we have made and digitize the ones we want to share with our family. That means we'll have to explain them too. So we're creating this blog.

We were married in August 1972. Soon we began looking for teaching jobs for Linda that would give us some adventure. We found one, in American Samoa. So in the spring of 1973 we got our passports and prepare to move half a world away. We celebrated our first anniversary in Pago Pago.

Here we are in our passport photos, Linda at 25 and Greg at 23:

And here we are now, Linda at 63 and Greg weeks away from 61: