College...and then marriage

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I attended Geneva College from August 1968 to June 1972. I roomed in 312 of Memorial Hall. My roommate for my freshman and sophomore years was Bill, a farm boy from Butler, PA. His family took me under their wing for which I will forever be grateful. When his mom learned that I didn’t have a blanket, she made me a quilt. My roommate in my junior year, Mike, was on the basketball team and captain in his senior year. In my senior year, I lived off campus and shared a house with four other guys.

I was an engineering major so I devoted most of my time to class work. One activity I was involved in during my freshman year was being a part of a missions outreach team on Sunday evenings with other Dalat alumni who attended Geneva. Our leader was Jodi, who had comforted me on my first day of first grade. We put on programs at various churches in the area.

For Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Spring breaks I went to visit relatives or friends. With the Vietnam War facing increased opposition, and draft dodgers moving to Canada, it became quite a chore to cross the border into Canada to visit family in Toronto. One time my cousin Bonnie Gay was with me. The immigration official asked where I was born. I answered “Bangkok, Thailand.” He then asked her the same question. When she answered “Shanghai, China” he thought were trying to play games with him. We were pulled aside and given the first degree interrogation and search. We eventually made it across when our passports confirmed our answers. I guess I should have claimed Canadian citizenship through my Mom, although she gave hers up in 1958.

I also visited Darryl and Marilyn who were living in Hampton, Virginia. At the end of the summer of '70 we camped at Nags Head, North Carolina. One spring weekend I was bored so I took a bus to the Pittsburgh airport and bought a student standby ticket the Newport News airport. All I had was the clothes on my back...no overnight bag with toothbrush and toothpast, or deodorant, or anything. Darryl, marilyn and I spent the weekend assembling a Jackson Pollock jigsaw puzzle.

For the summer of ’69, my chemistry professor helped me get a job at MSA Research. I helped design, build, and test moisture separators used in the containment vessel of nuclear power plants. I paid $100 for a 1960 Plymouth, so that I could drive to work. That summer my family returned to the States for furlough. I met them at the farms, and then followed them back to Sharon, PA, about an hour north of Geneva College, where they had rented a house for the year. The engine blew a rod and I spent $250 to put in a reconditioned engine. I drove home almost every weekend that year. My parents and sisters Judy and Carol returned to Thailand in July 1970, leaving my sister Sue at Nyack College.

For the summer of 1970 I got a job with the Northern Division of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, conducting fallout shelter analysis of all large buildings in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. My partner was from New York. We rented a two bedroom, sparsely furnished apartment across from the court house in Chambersburg. On long weekends he would drive home and drop me off at Nyack to visit my sister. I helped her a bit financially, and she was happy to have family nearby.

Franklin County was also very nice with many peach orchards; the peaches went great with vanilla ice cream! My partner and I would collect data in the mornings, and play tennis in the afternoons at Wilson College, a women’s school. We would then do all our calculations in the evenings as there was nothing else to do. One weekend we went to see “South Pacific” at a summer stock theater. Jean Stapleton, who that fall would star in television series “All in the Family,” played Bloody Mary to perfection.

The longest trip I took during college was for Spring Break 1971 to Fort Lauderdale, per Connie Francis’ song “Where the Boys Are,” but in our case it was more where the girls are. It was till the place to go. Five of us drove down to Florida in a super charged 1956 Chevy. We shared a room at a motel off the beach. The other four liked to drink and party all night, but I needed some sleep, so I moved in with four girls from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point.

In the summer of 1971 I worked for the St. Paul District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doing fallout shelter analysis in northern Minnesota. I just loved that area along the north shore of Lake Superior and inland all the way to the North Dakota border. I visited my Aunt Jean in Bena. I also visited the girls at Stevens Point over one long weekend.

In my junior and senior years I became more involved in the Engineering Society, and served as the editor of their magazine. I used this medium to lobby for the college to offer a civil engineering degree. I was the first to graduate from Geneva with the BS Civil Engineering degree.

At the beginning of my senior year in the fall of 1971, I identified a cute girl in the incoming freshman class. I found out her name was Linda. I was too shy to ask her out. I ended up taking a blind date to homecoming; what a mistake. So one day while walking from the student center to the library, I noticed her and a girlfriend sitting under the sycamore tree next to Old Main. I stopped to talk, mostly to her girlfriend. I soon got enough nerve to ask her for a date; which was a picnic overlooking the Beaver River. Anyway, that was the beginning of our romance. We spent a lot of time together. She particularly liked my cooking which I had learned on Doi Inthanon. I was a great chef even though I only had a popcorn popper to make soup and rice, and an electric skillet to make anything else.

In my senior year I had to get serious about lining up a job after graduation. Since my draft number was 107, there was a good chance that I would be drafted. I applied for Navy Officers Candidate School. I also applied for the graduate school of engineering at the University of Hawaii. And finally I wrote my Dad asking him to contact American engineering firms in Bangkok to see if they needed interns. I soon learned that I was accepted for Navy OCS, but they wanted me to be an intelligence officer. I was offered a graduate fellowship by the University of Hawaii, which sounded wonderful, but I didn’t want to be 8000 miles from Linda.

I learned that the Army wouldn’t be getting to my draft number so I turned down Navy OCS. I didn’t receive any answers on my enquiry about interning in Thailand before I graduated in June 1972, so left my option open for the University of Hawaii, and started work for the Pittsburgh District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doing more fallout shelter analysis in north central Pennsylvania. This way I could visit Linda on weekends. A couple weeks into the summer I learned that the commander of OICC/Thailand, where I had worked at their soils lab in the summer of ‘68, offered me an engineering intern position in Thailand. So I declined the graduate fellowship, accepted the job in Thailand. I asked Linda to marry me, and she said yes. We planned our wedding for the day after her final exams of the first semester of her sophomore year. But first I had to work in Norfolk, Virginia until they could arrange the visas, etc.

While working in Norfolk I drove a thousand miles each weekend to visit her in New Castle, PA. It was a good thing that gas was only 32 cents/gallon! We were married on December 23, 1972. Our honeymoon was in the Williamsburg area including Jamestown and Yorktown. We also started our shots.

We were told that we had reservation on a MAC flight in mid-January 1973, so we packed up all our stuff (fit in one box), and terminated our rent and utilities. As the day approached we still didn't have our visas, so we were told to go home to New Castle. We drove down to DC to see if we could help expedite the process. As a result, in early February we were on our way to Bangkok, Thailand.

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Photos

Bob skiing in Toronto
First time and just a bunny slope

Covered bridge at McConnell's Mill
Park near Linda's home