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light from the headlights.
Jean was anxious to be a good mother and attended parenting
classes at a nearby school. I had not realized that she was aware of what
poor mothering she had received from her Aunt Honey and she wanted
to do what was right and best for the kids. I, on the other hand, simply
wanted to do what I had seen my own dad do for me. We met a very nice
couple, the McElroys. They had a cute little blonde girl in a cooperative
nursery school that Jean tried to interest Richard in. Richard had no in-
terest. Jean was astonished when she said to him one day, “Isn’t Missy
McElroy a pretty little girl?” Richard replied, “So is her mother.”
Harry McElroy had worked in Yosemite as a student guide dur-
ing the summer vacations at Cal. We went to Yosemite with them on a
joint family camping trip. When we were ready to hike to the falls, we
took Richard to the children’s camp where they had a toy train and lots
of activities under the supervision of counselors. Richard shed buckets
of tears and didn’t want to leave his mother. I insisted that he would
have a great time and we left him crying in the children’s camp. We
returned after two or three minutes and he was playing very happily.
Later we drove up to Glacier Point. Going up and even more so
coming down, we could hear a repeated “clank, clank” from somewhere
under the hood. We looked at the engine block and nothing seemed
amiss. After we returned to the campground, I looked under the car and
found that a short bolt was protruding from the bottom of the cover over
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replaced on the Nash. Apparently, some sloppy mechanic had dropped a
bolt and had never retrieved it. Fortunately, there seemed to be no major
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While I had a job that was considered very good by Civil Ser-
vice standards, there was really no hope of promotion unless one went
to Washington, DC to higher levels of the government. I had been to
Washington twice on government business. While it was a fascinating
city to visit, the heat and humidity in the summer were terrible. I felt
penned in with no obvious outlet. A couple of times I had contacts with
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