Page 84 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

CHAPTER 23 - Married Life in Tallahassee

A few days later, we packed our earthly possessions onto a trailer hitched to my car,
and drove to Tallahassee where I entered Florida State University where I would be
tutored by Dr. Werner Baum who had launched the School of Meteorology just six
years earlier and Dr. Noel LaSeur who put me to work compiling Florida's rainfall
totals on a comptometer.

The only money I would have would be $125 a month from the GI Bill; consequently,
my bride took a job at Sears Roebuck in downtown Tallahassee. She quit that job a
month or two later to take a position of cashier at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. I
think God had a hand in that because she turned into an angel who guided my health
care many later years that included prostate cancer and two heart attacks.

We moved into an apartment on East College Street that we soon learned had mice. I
would set a mouse trap under the sink in the kitchen each evening, and then we would
hear the trap snap shut in the middle of the night, or I would look under the cabinet in
the morning and find a dead mouse in it. Tallahassee had just started a television
station, WCTV Channel 6, about that time.

I wanted to watch more than one channel, so I bought a TV antenna and mounted it on
top of the two-story apartment house. I almost had a tragic accident on the roof. It was
covered with slate tile and when I straddled the chimney to attach the antenna, my right
foot slipped on some moldy slates. If I had put all of my weight on that foot, I would
have slid down the roof and dropped about fifteen feet to a concrete pavement. I finally
pointed the antenna towards the east and we could occasionally receive a snowy picture
of Channel 4’s Bill Grove and the 6:30 PM news in Jacksonville. We could also catch
the Dothan, Alabama channel on the back side of the antenna.

Before the fall session started at FSU, I got a job with a construction company that
installed power poles in Monticello, about 30 miles east of Tallahassee. This was in the
day when the holes were dug by hand-operated post hole diggers. Some of the tastiest
lunches I ever ate were in the restaurant in downtown Monticello across from the
courthouse.

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