NEW BEGINNINGS
Have you ever heard about your parents’ first years together or first time striking out in the world? In this season of weddings and graduations and new beginnings, it is interesting to consider how some things are different—it is much easier today to stay in touch with old friends after moving to a new city!—and how some things are exactly the same, like that feeling of being overwhelmed and alone that can accompany a move. Learning about my parents’ experience in moving to a new state after my dad finished college—a move that was really difficult for my mom—was one of the most insightful parts of her life story:
Kim and Cyndi’s first year of marriage was Kim’s last year of college. He rode to Green Bay with a classmate three days per week so that Cyndi could take their 1967 Chevy Impala, cream with a black top (which they bought from Maggie and Sonny) to her job at Courtney and Plummer. The couple lived in a little apartment in Little Chute, on Park Avenue right above Doyle Park, owned by Cyndi’s cousin, Ray Sanderfoot. They were the first people to live in the newly remodeled place, which had two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a nice large kitchen. Paying eighty dollars per month in rent, along with Kim’s tuition, Kim and Cyndi ate a lot of macaroni and cheese and hot dogs (which Cyndi sometimes burned). Their parents would often send them home with extra loaves of bread or hamburger meat. Kim played with Marty’s band every weekend for extra money, and he did most of the laundry. Life was good, if not much different from the time before marriage.
Kim graduated from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay with a B.S. in Environmental Controls in May of 1973. Cyndi was immensely proud of him and excited that their “real life” would begin. Several family members accompanied her to the graduation ceremony: Josephine and Sandy, Maggie, and Dianne and Jerry and their three children (because Dianne wanted her kids to see someone graduating from college).
Kim was just happy to be finished. But the economy in the early seventies was terrible and getting a job in his field was difficult. He sent resumes to every DNR office and manufacturer he could find. He was so desperate, he applied to a job in Guam! Rejection after rejection came in, and one day he told Cyndi that he was going to “fill up the bathtub, eat a peanut butter sandwich, and hope to get a cramp and die.” Cyndi claims to have been young and dumb enough not to be worried.
Finally, in July, Kim got a call from Mead Corporation inviting him to interview for a job in Chillicothe, Ohio. Of course, he accepted—but he’d received a rejection letter from Mead the previous day, so he did not have a great deal of hope. Kim flew home from the interview and announced that he’d gotten the job, and that he’d already accepted it. They were moving to Ohio. Cyndi hadn’t been consulted. She was shocked and she was scared.
“I can’t move,” she told her mother.
“You have to,” said Josephine. “That’s your husband. You go where he wants to go.”
To say Kim “wanted” to go might have been a stretch, as he had no particular interest in southern Ohio or in leaving his home state. But the job was good, a corporate job in central research that paid $925 per month. He would be the youngest person in the department—by a lot—and he’d be traveling quite a bit, figuring out how to keep Mead’s many paper manufacturing plants in compliance with the spate of new federal legislation dealing with air and water quality.
Kim was 22 and Cyndi was 21 when they flew to Ohio to find an apartment. Prior to this, Cyndi’s only trips out of the state had been for oleo runs (Michigan) and work trips (Minnesota). (There was also a family trip to Louisiana to visit Josephine’s brother Joe, but Cyndi had been too young to remember it; all eight Sanderfoots drove there in Sandy’s big Buick, with Cyndi perched on a little chair on the floor in the backseat.) Kim and Cyndi found an ugly little apartment in the Western Hills apartment complex. It had no doors on the kitchen cabinets and the wind blew straight through the windows, but it was cheap.
Kim and Cyndi traded in their Chevy for a little Ford Pinto station wagon, because the Pinto got better gas mileage—they wanted to be able to afford road trips home, and there were gas shortages during the energy crisis of the early seventies. On the day the moving truck brought all ten boxes of their possessions to Chillicothe, Kim left for an eight-day work trip. Cyndi was so frightened that she didn’t sleep the whole time he was gone. For the first time in her life, she felt utterly alone.