Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I remain confident of this:
    I will see the goodness of the Lord
    in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
    be strong and take heart
    and wait for the Lord.

• Psalm 27:13-14

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

• Mark 9:35

To explain the verses, Psalm 27:14 is the verse my wife quoted most often, but when you add Psalm 27:13 and Mark 9:35, you get the essence of the woman I married.

Last week we had a second honeymoon.  The title of this chapter is “Awaiting Orders.”  They were not her orders, but my orders to report for active duty.  And we both awaited them and it changed what we did during those two years.

Most of my memories of those two years are muddled in working and schooling for me.  I even became a contributing author of a book during that time.  She was knuckling down to get better grades and focus on her schooling.

But during our second honeymoon, my sports car started backfiring in the high altitudes.  This vibration caused the tailpipe to loosen from the exhaust manifold.  Just when my wife had to start college, she took the sports car to school just as the tail pipe separated from the manifold, hanging on by one remaining bolt, barely.  With no muffler basically, the engine rumbled loudly.  At a traffic light, some high school students in a hot rod pulled up next to her.  Our sports car was a stick shift.  She revved the engine, and the high school boys did the same.  They asked if she wanted to race.  At that moment, the traffic light turned green, and my wife went through the stick shift and clutch rhythm like an experienced drag racer.  The boys never had a chance.  The truth was that she had very little experience with a stick shift.  Her fun was over within a couple of hours when, between classes, she took the car to the dealership, and they found one bolt was barely hanging on and the other bolts missing.  Three new bolts and we made a lot less noise and the boys didn’t try to race her ever again.

In the meantime, I calculated that I needed one more semester, maybe two semesters, to finish my masters’ degree.  I applied for a year extension to my graduate school deferment.  The request was eventually granted.  But, in true Army fashion, the orders eventually had me reporting in mid-April.  I was blessed in that it only took one extra semester.

I think I will divide this into things that ran parallel to each other.

Moving to Nederland, Texas

While the landlady who got us together ran our old apartment complex, the changes in tenants changed drastically.  Each young engineer that bought a home and moved out was replaced by rougher, cruder, and louder tenants.  As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, a former fellow employee of my wife wrecked my car and I had to fix it myself since she never produced any insurance information and her ex-husband wanted me dead.  With that kind of people moving in, we moved out.

We found a very quiet apartment complex.  Some cousins of the Dutch people on the Chamber of Commerce lived there and we were highly recommended.  We ended up with a two-bedroom apartment directly over the apartment manager’s apartment.  We had to be very quiet.

During our stay there, I made some furniture on the patio and spilled a little paint.  She would not let me grind the paint stain off the concrete, so we had to pay for one of those fancy stone floors when we left.  The patio was very small, so it wasn’t a lot, but they were not joking about having to be quiet.  Yet, our neighbor played her rock music loudly a few nights of the week without anyone making her stop.

Starting a Family

My wife and I had a lot of discussions regarding the start of the family.  We had both read the statistics that marriages that had a child within the first two years of marriage were a lot more likely to end in divorce than those families that waited.  But my wife pointedly asked me to do the math.  In two years, where would I be?  In two years, I would probably be in Engineer Office Basic Training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.  Then she asked, and then what?  I would probably have a three-year assignment either in the US or overseas.

She did not want to have a baby with me not around.  She did not think that being in a military school environment would leave me with the ability to skip class when the baby came.  So, if we waited, we would not be able to start trying to have a baby until late 1977 with the baby coming mid- to late-1978.  Which meant she would be nearly thirty.  She thought her biological clock would leave us with few options at that point.  These days people wait into their 40s, but back then, they did not.  We started trying for the baby soon after we got married.

With having a baby on the way, or trying to have that happen, I sold the sports car.  We bought a sporty family car, fire engine red, but it had the classic two full bench seats.  This was before baby car seats were widely available, long before they were mandatory, so we thought a baby carrier, strapped in with the two front seat belts would be more safety than most children had.  When we got to Europe, the children had to be in the back seat in properly designed car seats.  That became a learning experience.

Before she could get pregnant, she had to quit smoking, and she was hooked.  The thought of the baby having problems convinced her to stop the habit.  She stopped about the same time she got pregnant.  Our son was small and stayed small.  This could be from the fact that the poisons from smoking had not fully left her system, but it could simply be genetics.  Her father was the only male sibling less than six feet tall in his family.

Other than learning how often she went to the bathroom on trips, the pregnancy went by with no problems.  We missed a bicentennial baby by less than a week.  He came too early, for the big date and also well before he was due.

My wife continued in her schooling, nursing school, throughout the pregnancy.  With a due date in mid-summer, she did not take summer school classes.  Ignoring the fact that I had an Army commitment, she did not place great urgency on her school schedule.

One weekend in June, my wife saw her doctor, who would deliver the baby on Friday. He said she needed to take it easy. She replied, “But the Cincinnati Reds and playing the Astros tonight in the Astrodome and I’m driving. It’s a half-dozen engineers from my husband’s workplace.” The doctor groaned, but he did not know everything. I played 36 holes of golf the next day, but she drove the golf cart. Eighteen holes on pleasure island south of Port Arthur and then eighteen holes in Beaumont, Texas. Then on Sunday afternoon, I took her to the movies to see what would become my favorite movie, Murder by Death, Neil Simon at his greatest in my opinion. My wife seemed to have no ill effects.

But she was not feeling well that next Monday, and she decided to go to see the doctor.  She needed the car for that, so she dropped me off at work.  Her water broke at the doctor’s office, and they rushed her across the street to the hospital.  That is when things got sticky.

She simply said that she was being admitted to the hospital and I had to come to the hospital to pay an admission fee.  But she had the car, our only car since she had sold hers.  I thought it was those Braxton Hicks she had told me about.  She was not due for nearly a month.  She got angry and said I needed to get a move on.  My office partner gave me a lift and the boss allowed our absence.  I had a project with a big deadline looming, so I brought a pad of paper with me to hand write computer code (since I created computer applications to make the chemical plant work more efficiently at the time).  After I had paid the fees and she was in a nice labor room, she saw my homework and kicked me out of the labor room.  The policy at that time with that hospital was no natural childbirth.  She was knocked out with anesthesia.  I was not allowed beyond the labor room.  And the doctor, after an investigation that followed with other deliveries, might have been high on something when he delivered our son.

The oddities were that when they told me he was in the nursery, our son had a pink blanket wrapped around him, and when my wife came out of the anesthesia, she apologized for producing a girl.  I quickly wanted answers since the doctor and a nurse said we had a boy.  The nurse apologized in that they ran out of blue blankets, and my wife had her wires crossed – fuzzy brain due to lingering effects of anesthesia.  Otherwise, nothing went wrong, until my wife came home, and our son did not.  He had newborn jaundice.  His stay was lengthened until after the bicentenary.

My sister and her family, whose husband was in Del Rio, Texas in the Air Force at the time, came and they could not play with the baby, isolated under strange lights.  That is when my brother-in-law quipped (poking fun at my mother’s hateful comment), “He doesn’t look like a circus freak to me!”  Rest assured, my sister hit him in the ribs hard enough to break a couple.

We named him in the family tradition as the oldest son of that generation.  My brother told me once I called him that me doing that did not count.  I did not know that this would set off a series of events in my brother’s life.  He divorced his wife, who could have no more children, and he married a woman who produced a son a little too soon.  The session of the church where he was the pastor scolded him and made threats.

And all this discussion is about my family and the new arrival.  My mother-in-law was in Holland since the baby was not due for another month.  She was one of the last ones to see the baby and she lived just a few miles down the road.

With our son not six weeks old, my wife had to go to the Texas Folklife Festival with her family’s singing group.  I kept our son in the shade of the Dutch booth as I sold cookies.  One of the other ladies suggested that we go back to the hotel and others could fill in.  It was very hot in San Antonio that year.  When our son awoke a few hours later, he was beyond fussy.  My wife determined that he was probably dehydrated from the oppressive heat.  We tried every trick in the book, but by 1:00am we had run out of ideas.  They had hospitals, but nothing like urgent care in those days.  So, we went to Mi Tierra’s Restaurant.  We had not eaten while trying to calm him down, and in true desert fashion, there was a cool moist breeze blowing that night and the restaurant would be the perfect way to overload a six-week-old senses.  With a fussy baby and no one wanting the troubadours to play at their table, the management suggested they park at our table, singing every song in their repertoire.  They refused payment an hour later.  We did not have enough cash to pay for all the singing, but we thought we should pay for them singing our son to sleep.  They just enjoyed having the opportunity to help.

From a couple to a “family” of five

Soon after bringing our newborn home, my wife’s next younger sister returned to the USA.  She did not want to have an extended stay with her parents and her husband’s father was not set up for that kind of thing, so my wife invited them to stay with us until they found a married apartment accommodation at the university where my wife and I attended.  My sister-in-law’s husband was starting engineering school.

But before we reaped the benefits of built-in babysitting, they were gone.

This allowed us to put our son in his own room and our lives could get back to normal.  While we had another wedded couple in the other bedroom, our son slept in our room.  We got little sleep for those few weeks.

Too Many Events at Once

With our son roughly six-months-old, I got my diploma with a masters of engineering with a specialty in chemical engineering.  Most of the course work was in mechanical engineering, but their department refused, and the knowledge was easily transferable.  Many masters’ degree recipients do not go to the ceremony, but I did.  After the ceremony as my wife gathered our son and walked him up the stairs to the apartment, I got the mail from the mailbox.  One of the items was from the government.  I had an approved deferment until mid-summer, but I had orders to report to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just south of Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, DC beyond in mid-April.  If I had taken the added semester, I could not have finished.  The orders also said that I would report to a Combat Engineer (Heavy) battalion in Knielingen, West Germany.  I could not find it on the map, but I learned it was a suburb of Karlsruhe on the northwest side of town near the Rhein River.

I was supposed to get a monster pay raise with the advanced degree, but the union was rattling sabers.  The union threatened a strike, and the company management “postponed” the automatic advancement in pay grade and pay raise until the union contract was signed.  The first of many, many company falsehoods that left me without promotion or pay raise.

But the military orders and the degree completion happened only about ten days before the union strike started.  As an engineer at the plant, I was suddenly thrust into twelve hours of work, twelve hours off, seven days each week.  They paid overtime, and my wife went to the Toyota dealership and asked, “What kind of a deal can I get, if I pay you cash for a car?”  With her Dad being a local credit union manager, she got a sweet deal.

But the toll was heavy on her.  The strike lasted far longer than the time I had before I had to report.  For three months, including our second wedding anniversary, I worked twelve hours, spent another hour driving to and from work, ate supper and showered over another hour, and the rest of the time, I slept.  Every day the same for three months.  But as for the cash, it came in very handy.

In going on active duty, my pay was reduced, not considering the strike work overtime, to one-third what I had been paid as an engineer.  Welcome to the Army, Lieutenant!

And before anyone gets upset.  The union considered the engineers at the plant to be workers trapped by the system.  But if anyone came over from the Houston main office, they were scabs, and if the union could find a way to rough them up, they did.  One night, all the outside windows of a hotel were blasted out by shotguns.  No one was hurt, but it brought the company management back to the negotiating tables.  And the resultant contract included that the company would pay for the hotel room repairs, but no one claimed to have done it.  Yes, all in the name of doing business.

But what I am saying about my wife is that she maintained her highest grade point average during a semester when she was essentially a single Mom, and the second half of that semester, she was a single Mom after I went to Engineer Officer Basic and she stayed to finish the semester.

But my wife finished her studies a little early.  She begged her father to let her stay in school.  She only lacked a year and she would be a registered nurse, but he simply said, “Your place is with your husband.  I have confidence that he will stay true to you, but I wonder about you.”  He had a long history of distrusting her, but she was probably the least wild of any of the sisters.

She nodded and moved to my folks’ home.  By this time, my brother’s second wife was causing trouble and the daughter from his first marriage was living with my parents.  My wife offered herself as the buffer, for our niece’s sake.  But this was hazardous duty in that my mother hated her.

She talked my parents into driving her to Fort Belvoir.  I found an apartment, not cheap, but no six-month lease either.  She arrived with a week or so to plan a birthday party, his first, for our son.  There was only one boy his age as a dependent of one of the young second lieutenants in my class.  Our son, small for his age, and the other boy, like his Dad, a tall drink of water.  His Dad was closer to seven feet than six feet, and his son made twice the size and more of our son, but our son had a lot more mobility.  The strange thing was that we learned our son was fussy and demanding.  We got a half cake, half ice cream birthday cake.  With each bite, he cried until we washed his hands before he took the next bite.  It was that kind of birthday party.

When I graduated with honors, we drove our car to the Norfolk Naval Yard for shipment to Bremerhaven, West Germany and then flew back to Memphis, TN where my Dad picked us up.  We sold the other car and said goodbye to everyone, including one more trip to the Texas Folklife Festival where our son walked in his wooden shoes for the first time. And at one point while she was singing, he tore from my grasp and clippity clopped his way to his mother – and upstaged the family singing group (picture above).

When my Dad drove us to Memphis to catch our flight to Germany, we got there early.  He asked if we had any last requests, and my wife said, “I have never seen Graceland.”  My Dad drove up to the musical front gates and the guard said that we could not come on to the property.  Elvis was not feeling well, otherwise, he would have let us walk around in the front yard.

When we arrived in Germany the next morning with our son not sleeping a wink on the flight, the headlines of the Stars and Stripes read, “Elvis is Dead!”  I have since done the math, and it is possible he collapsed, to be found a little later, about the time my wife posed in front of the Graceland gates.

And what is next?

We arrive in Germany and my wife has a mixture of newfound family and old memories that make things difficult.

And to all this, I give praise and honor to God.  Only He knew that the two of us would one day marry each other, and it would truly be until death did we part.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.