We arrived in Syracuse in September 1947 and were sent to a big old 3-story Victorian close to campus which had about 9 rooms, a communal bathroom on the 2nd floor and a largish kitchen. It had been a dorm and was now destined to lodge 9 families of new faculty. We were first to arrive and got the biggest and best room, on the 2nd floor, overlooking the main drag up to campus and with a closet with a window that would fit a crib. I have no memory of how our minimal stock of furniture was transported or how we got there ourselves but we had no car so it must have been by train. (I am reminded of this period by the recent move of granddaughter Hilary and her husband and 9-mo old twins from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh. No car but plenty of family help.) Other families began to trickle in and when the house was full we had a meeting and arranged kitchen use – 3 couples at a time got an hour between 5 and 8 to prepare and eat dinner. We bought a pressure cooker and had a lot of one-dish meals. The bathroom was even more challenging and no schedule was possible, just consideration at all times. It was large and had lines of toilets, sinks and showers. All out there out in the open. No wonder it had fallen from use as a dorm. The door locked so if you needed privacy you had to pick your time, or inconvenience a host of others. Showers the same, only tooth brushing was communal. Babies got bathed in a big sink in the kitchen. No laundry facilities – I did not have a washer/dryer til we moved to California. Used to tote the dirty clothes to a laundromat by bus. It was a scramble in the mornings but there were no whiners. Our parents were quite shocked but we felt lucky to have a place to eat and sleep. Housing had not yet started to recover from the war years (except in California).
Our best friends were Don and Janice Bowen from Utah and we kept up with them for many years. Don was a relapsed Mormon who had very little good to say about his youth under the restrictions of the church. (He was the first of many friends who rejected religion, altho later they were usually ex-Catholics.) He went to teach at U of Arizona after he got his PhD. We saw them in Tucson years later but the magic was gone. And indeed, until we settled in California in 1955 we had no enduring friendships, too many moves for us and/or them. Indeed, we moved 10 times in our first 10 years together, and then once more – after a 43 year interval!
Vivid is the memory of the day the students returned to campus. Hearing the hum of many voices on the street, I looked down from our 2nd floor windows and was astonished to see that during the summer fashion had changed radically and all the coeds were wearing ankle-length, swirling wool skirts that literally dragged on steps behind them. Christian Dior’s New Look had come to town. We were isolated from events in the fashion world, and indeed from all but out own little world, and I was totally blindsided by the universal change in women’s attire over the summer. Somehow I found the money to buy two huge swaths of wool and make myself a couple of fashionable skirts. I had a sewing machine, our one appliance if you don’t count the pressure cooker. The New Look was short-lived and the next year I used the material in the skirts make new ones, getting two from each big swirl. Within 6 months the university had remodeled a barracks at the edge of town into faculty housing and we moved into a 2-bedroom apartment. It was a barren landscape but again we were surrounded by families of the same size and shape, and pursuing the same course. There were lots of opportunities for friends and baby sitters. I got a half-time job in a new cytology lab in the hospital but it couldn’t compare to Ruth Graham’s lab. Eric and I shared baby care, he taught mornings and I worked afternoons. We saved furiously, knowing we would probably be moving again.
We could have stayed, and Eric could have done his PhD in English, but Syracuse seemed like an interlude we couldn’t see our
future there. 
Heath learned to walk and climb steps and was almost 2 when we left. Very few photos were taken, even of Heath, and they are so tiny and grainy they are not worth reproducing. One aspect of our stay in Syracuse that was fun was the advent of the new post-war design era. There was an explosion of new products for home and work and we were hungry for it. Kitchenware, dinnerware, furniture, bedding, clothes, fabrics and houses themselves all came on the scene. There were a lag between ordering and receiving a factories converted; I think It took 6 months for us to get a 4-place set of Fiesta ware dishes. And perhaps the best acquisition we made was Glidden ware, individually painted mammals on square plates with we fell in love with on first sight, and had the sense to splurge on a whole set of dinnerware. It was the product of Alfred University’s ceramics program it has been in constant use ever since. I just googled it and couldn’t find the plates anywhere, altho there is an occasional casserole and cover with the hippo on it.
Eric had long been intrigued by the professors and programs at U of Chicago. He still wanted to go on in Philosophy and was granted a scholarship, so a
fter 2 years in Syracuse we were off to the mid-west. My Dad bought us a car, a Studebaker and a post-war design by Raymond Lowy, the start of a new era in auto design. It was an object of attention, the New Look in automobiles. PHOTO of car What a difference that car made. We had it for 6 years in Chicago and it made possible excursions to the Indiana Dunes and up into Wisconsin as well as summers at Lake Buel and even a Canadian adventure, our first outside of the U.S. I had long wanted to travel but it was not until we left for California that my yearnings began to materialize.