Tucson, November 28, 1966

Dear Family,

At long last, after a certain amount of blackmail, we have received letters from all of you. Lloyd, rather sheepishly handed me his letter, when we met him at the Thanksgiving dinner at Marta and Bob’s. We had to forgive him, because him because it contained some very good pics of Brian Jon. We will send them along, but we do want them back. He is sure getting to be a good looking boy- in spite of his old man. We enjoyed spending the day with so many of our family. With both Grandmothers there, you can well imagine that Brian Jon received his share of attention.

We talked to David and Marion Thanksgiving morning. David is planning to come to Tucson about the 16^th of December. After he spends some time with his friends here, we will go back to California for Christmas if we don’t get cold feet.

Rina, we found your letter waiting at Marta’s. We were very glad to hear from you and had been wondering if you were ill or something because we had not heard from you for so long. It is a nice thought to send them via the Wilsons, but my little Martita is so snowed under with church activities that she sometimes forgets to send them along. I think you had better send them to us first and we will send them back to her. We were very sorry to hear that someone “lifted your leather”. We hope that you got your important papers back anyway.

Bill, we enjoyed your letter very much. I am sure you would have killed a deer with your bow – if someone had held a lamp behind him. Thanks mucho for the invitation, but I have been freezing in both California and Arizona. I don’t think I would stand it in Utah. Why don’t you send us a picture of Lloyd? If you take it just before you write your next letter to us, you might catch him making a high jump.

Robin, we enjoyed your letter very much. How is Queenie? We took Cinders to California with us. Candy and Rinda liked her very much. They became very good friends and hated to see her go.

While we were coming back from Guadalajara we solved a mystery that has been making us wonder ever since Mother, David, Rina and Marta joined me in Japan in 1955. When they left Ft. Mason they were given very, very red carpet treatment. They were called to board the plane before the other passengers, given choice seats forward and to the envy of the other passengers, some of whom were Colonel’s wives, given preferred attention generally. David was even taken to the cockpit by the pilots and shown the works.

Well, we were in a Trailer Court in Mazatlan, sitting in front of the trailer, watching the waves, when a man approached us and remarked that he had a trailer like ours, but was parked in another court. We engaged in conversation and learned that he too had retired from the Army and was the Provost Marshal at Ft. Mason when Mother, David and the girls had their “red carpet” experience. We told him of their experience and he said that it was quite easy for him to understand. He said that at that time a General McKay was the Commanding General of Ft. Mason and that his wife was termagant, a veritable Virago. She and her mother had the personnel of Ft. Mason so cowed, that when she said jump, all they asked was; “how far?” Anyway rather than take chances that anyone named McKay was a relative of the General’s wife, anyone of that name was treated with kid gloves. There you have it girls. All these years you have been trying to make something romantic out of the incident, but anyway you had a nice ride.

I don’t know if it was because Mother and I ate too much turkey at Marta’s, but for some reason our bed, that was not too strong at best, choose night before last to collapse. What a night we had! Mother moved to the couch and I slept, or tried to sleep with my feet higher than my head. Every time I turned over another slat would fall, until I began to feel like a pretzel. When I did dose off I coughed myself awake because of the cold draughts whistling through the room.

Yesterday morning, the first thing Mother said, was; “We have got to find another apartment! “ I was called to do a small job for my old boss. As I was leaving Sister Jesperson came in for a visit. When Mother told her that we were going to move she cried. The upshot was, that we bought a space heater for the bath room. The Jespersons gave us a new bed, we stopped up all the pneumonia holes, Mother got me a night cap and last night we or, rather I had the best sleep in weeks.

We love you,

Dad