Moving around

 Eventually I may get around to posting some properly chronological entries, starting from my earliest memories and going forward.  But I had a request from my kids to write about how we came to make various international moves.  I’ll start way before kids though, from the first time I moved anywhere on my own.

 It is hard to fathom why someone who doesn’t particularly like travelling and doesn’t enjoy the stresses associated with moving house (even within the same city) has moved internationally four times.  Someone must be a glutton for punishment.

 Most of this story is about being lucky – being in the right place at the right time and, importantly, having the right qualifications to be able to accept the opportunities that came my way.  My life has been more about doors that have opened for me rather than me going out and looking for doors to knock on or kick down.

Off to university

Several of my high school friends had a clear vision of what they wanted to do in life.  At least three wanted to be doctors and one a lawyer, and those four all made it into their intended professions.  I, on the other hand, had no idea what I wanted to do or become.  My father was a doctor but I had no interest in following in his footsteps.  I was reasonably good, but certainly not exceptional, at math and liked science.  I didn’t see myself as a math teacher and didn’t know what else one could do with math.  We didn’t have guidance counsellors at my high school back in those days and though my parents were both college graduates they didn’t know anything about mathematically-related fields.

 My parents had both attended the University of Cape Town (UCT) and that is the only college I applied to.  We lived in Port Elizabeth and there is a university there, then called the University of Port Elizabeth (now Nelson Mandela University).  But my parents had a low opinion of it and it was a dual-language university with some fields taught in English and others in Afrikaans.  Mathematics was one of the latter.  My Afrikaans was very poor at that stage and I didn’t want to have to struggle with that language any more than I had already done in high school.  (We had to take both the official languages at the time through high school.)  Fortunately I was accepted into UCT.

 So early in 1973 my parents took me to the railway station in Port Elizabeth and put me on the train to Cape Town.  From there I was on my own.  The train journey used to take well over 24 hours, partly because it wasn’t very direct.  Port Elizabeth and Cape Town are at about the same latitude and the direct route by road is about 500 miles, but the railway line first goes many miles in a northerly direction before turning south-west.  There were several other students on the same train heading off to UCT.  I became friendly with a bunch of Chinese guys, a couple of whom were going to be in the same residence hall as me.  (I took the train on at least one other occasion, which I remember because of a girl I met and later dated briefly.  The briefly is partly because I wasn’t a serious runner yet and didn’t understand the stresses a competitive sportsperson feels the evening before a major game.)  I didn’t have a car at that time and, besides, first-year students weren’t allowed to have cars on campus.  One who did manage to have a car – a brand-new Alfa Romeo Alfetta – was a classmate, Norm Adami.  He went on to have an illustrious career in the beer industry, including being President and CEO of Miller Brewing Company and later of SABMiller Americas.

 Why I mentioned that the fellow-students were Chinese is for a digression on one of the vagaries of Apartheid.  At the time South Africa had a small Chinese community, who had been in the country for a few generations.  (South Africa now has re-established close ties with China, after having had essentially no contact during the Apartheid years.)  In terms of the Group Areas Act, most of the Chinese had to live in their own special areas, but they were allowed to attend “white” universities and were the only race other than whites who were allowed to stay in “white” residence halls at these universities.  What was particularly bizarre was that on the long-distance trains they were allowed to travel in “white” sleeper cars, BUT they were not allowed to eat in the “white” dining saloon – they had to get a steward to bring them meals in their sleeper compartment.

 Most of these students were first-years, like me.  One, Patrick Wong Fung, was in his third or fourth year and so knew his way around.  I don’t recall how we got from the Cape Town station to our residence hall, but presume Patrick helped organize that.  A year or so later Patrick turned 21 and I was part of the group that helped him celebrate.  As part of the “celebration” later that evening we took him a few miles from the residence call, stripped him down to his underwear and left him to make his way back in that state of undress.  “Streaking” was in the news quite often at the time,  As Patrick was making his way along Main Road, Rondebosch, he thought to himself that he should do a proper streak and so took off his underwear.  Unfortunately, just then a police vehicle happened by and he was hauled off to the local police station.  They let him go eventually but I don’t recall whether he was fined or had to go to court.

 Patrick is at least partly responsible for me becoming a statistician.  He majored in mathematical statistics and a couple of years after we met he suggested I take a class in math stat.  The rest, as they say, is history.  In the mid- to late-70s his family moved to Canada, after which I lost contact with him.  I’ve tried searching for him on the Internet but so far without any success.

 As I mentioned at the start of this section, I didn’t know what I wanted to study.  I changed direction a few times and so spent 5 years at UCT.  Then I had to do compulsory military service.  If I had had more get-up-and-go or been more mature, perhaps I would have considered leaving South Africa at that point, to study further in the US or Britain.  But that thought never crossed my mind.

UCT, with Devil’s Peak and the eastern side of Table Mountain, as seen from the residence hall where I lived for 5 years

Off to “war”

Most of my high school classmates had done their initial service directly after high school.  A few of us, including the three who wanted to be doctors, were granted deferment to go to college first.  That had advantages and disadvantage.  The major downside was that if we had gone in 1973 like the rest, our initial service would have been just 9-11 months, but in the interim that had been increased to 2 years.  On the other hand, most of those who went in 1973 were in the army and many saw active combat.  Those of us who had graduated from college with degrees that were at least semi-useful were put into positions that made some use of our education.

 One or two of the people who came to the seminars in the Department of Mathematical Statistics at UCT were statisticians who worked at the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT), the naval branch of Armscor (the government’s military research organization).  I think they knew I was about to graduate and managed to pull strings to get me into the Navy and from there seconded to IMT.  (I hadn’t asked them to do that and don’t recall whether they had even told me they were trying to arrange that.  This is one of the examples of being in the right place at the right time with the right qualifications.)  So, my call-up for service was to the Navy.

 In early January of 1978 my parents again dropped me off at the Port Elizabeth railway station, this time for the journey on a troop train to the Naval training base at Saldanha Bay.  When we got there, those of us who had been to college were separated from the rest of the conscripts while the brass worked out what to do with us.  (The commanding officer heard that I had studied operations research and so got me working on optimizing schedules for guard duty.  When not doing that I was allowed to run as much as I wanted.) 

 After a few days they drove us to the Naval training base at Simon’s Town, on the south-western outskirts of greater Cape Town.  There we were put on a three-month Officers’ Orientation Course (OOC).  For more on that, see the entry from December 30, 2017 titled “SFAD; self harm; or Daddy, what did you do in the war?”  As noted in that entry, for those three months I was not allowed to run, other than in squad formation.  At the end of the OOC we were assigned to various places, with several of us going to IMT (which is also in Simon’s Town).  Full-time employees at IMT are civilians and so don’t wear uniform.  Those of us doing national service had to wear Navy uniforms and also periodically had Navy duties, such as being the Officer of the Day overnight or on weekends (that is, we were in charge of the naval base and responsible for giving permission for ships to enter or leave the harbor, directing firefighters if there was a bushfire on the mountain behind the town, and generally responding to any crisis that might occur, such as an enemy invasion.  There was a pistol in a safe for us to use if we needed it to repel the enemy).  That previous blog post doesn’t mention what I did at IMT, so I should probably add a separate entry on that, explaining what a digital blimp filter is and why I wasn’t supposed to read the reports I wrote (because they were secret and a conscript wasn’t allowed to have a security rating of Secret).

 As my two year stint in the Navy was drawing to a close it was time to think of looking for a job!

Simon’s Town

Gainfully employed!

 Along with some of the other statisticians at IMT, I had been attending statistics seminars at UCT.  I was reasonably confident of being able to get an appointment as a lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Statistics.  In fact, I was so sure that I would be there that several months before the end of my Navy service my brother Mick and I leased an apartment together in Rondebosch, near UCT, and I commuted to IMT from there.  But I had also applied for a position in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, partly because my parents had just moved to that city. 

 UCT did indeed offer me a position and so did UNISA.  The offer from UNISA was substantially higher.  UNISA is a distance-learning institution, using just ordinary mail back in those pre-Internet days.  So I wouldn’t have to stand in front of a class.  On the other hand, it provided materials in both English and Afrikaans and I would need to become much more proficient in the latter language.  At the time UNISA had several outstanding professors in the statistics side of the department.  They would have fitted in well at a top university anywhere in the world.  A couple of them did later move to the US and Europe and some others spent sabbaticals in highly-ranked departments internationally.

 After much vacillation, I accepted the offer from UNISA.  I can claim to have been way ahead of my time, doing something that now seems quite commonplace – I moved back in with my parents.

UNISA offer letter

UNISA offer conditions

Back to Cape Town

 As part of the national service obligation of white males, after the initial two-year period we were eligible to be called up for “camps” of 1-3 months duration every two years for the next 12 years.  We were also supposed to attend regular meetings or parades (which I somehow managed to avoid).

 Pretoria was okay, but it is very conservative and a long way from the coast.  In February/March 1981 I was called up for a one-month “camp” which I spent back at IMT.  While there I started negotiating for a permanent (civilian) position at IMT.  Part of that was so as to get back to Cape Town.  Another, more compelling, reason was to try to get in on the property market.  Back then (and presumably still now) in South Africa part of the benefits package when employed by large organizations, including the government, was a housing subsidy – subsidized mortgage payments.  However, for government positions, including at universities, the housing subsidy was restricted to married men (presumably at that time specifically white married men).  Armscor (and hence IMT) was one of the few exceptions that provided a housing subsidy for single men too, which was a major draw for me at the time.  (As it happened, between beginning to try to get a job at IMT and starting to work there, I met and married Riëtta, so the “single men” part was no longer relevant.)  Long story short, we bought a house (actually a townhouse/duplex) in Tokai, greater Cape Town.  I moved down there first and then Riëtta followed after she had finished teaching at the end of the semester.

IMT offer letter page 1

IMT offer letter page 2

IMT offer letter page 3

Tokai.
  Top: a view of the trails in the forest behind our house
Middle: the Tokai Manor House
Bottom: our house

I worked at IMT for about a year.  I wasn’t particularly happy there that time around.  That was probably mostly because of my supervisor, with whom I had to work closely.  He seemed to be out of it much of the time.  It wasn’t until later that I heard he was quite ill and that it was either the illness or the medication for it that made him drowsy.  The work was interesting – helping to devise tactics for avoiding anti-ship missiles.  I had started at IMT just as the Royal Navy was discovering in the Falklands War how vulnerable surface ships are to anti-ship missiles.

Meanwhile, a former colleague at UNISA, Peter Salemink, had been teaching Applied Business Statistics in the Department of Business Science at UCT.  He wanted to move back to Pretoria and was looking for someone to take over his position.  Here was an opportunity to leave IMT and to work at UNT.  Once again I was in the right place at the right time, with appropriate qualifications.  I applied and was offered the position.  That didn’t require a move, not even to a new house as our house in Tokai was about halfway between UCT and IMT.

UCT Business Science offer

And back to Pretoria

 Being in Cape Town was generally good, but it was a long way away from our families and the position at UCT didn’t have much in the way of long-term prospects (unless I found a way to move to what became the Department of Statistical Sciences).  So when an opportunity arose to move back to Pretoria I grabbed it.  We sold our house, bought one in Pretoria and moved at the end of 1985.  My old department had split, with the Operations Research component renamed and moving out.  So I joined what had become the Department of Statistics.

UNISA 1985 offer

In the middle of 1986 my mother was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer.  So it was good that we had moved back to Pretoria because it meant we got to see her quite often in what turned out to be the last year of her life.  One aspect of the timing of her death that was particularly unfortunate was that she just missed seeing her first grandchild – Steven was born 19 days after she passed away. 

 

To Seattle

 When my mother knew she probably didn’t have much longer to live, she wrote letters to me, each of my brothers, and my father, to be found and opened after her death.  In my letter she urged me to try to study overseas.  (My brother Mick was already preparing to move to the US, initially to do an MS at the University of Michigan, while finishing his PhD thesis at a South African university.  If our mother had lived few more months he would have left and probably not have come back for her funeral.)

Unlike Mick, who was still single, I had a family to support, so the financial implications of becoming a full-time student again were more substantial.  But I had been at UNISA long enough to have earned paid sabbatical leave and my mother had left me (and my two brothers) a small amount of money.  So I started looking for places to do a PhD in the US, with a view to starting in 1990.

It is hard to imagine it now, but back in those days the web didn’t exist yet.  It wasn’t possible to look up information about universities and courses online, because there wasn’t such a thing as online.  Even email was still a novelty and I wasn’t yet aware of its existence.  Somehow I obtained a copy of a booklet that had information about all the US universities offering PhD programs in statistics or biostatics.  Using that, I took a systematic approach to deciding where to apply.  As Riëtta and I were keen runners, I crossed off all universities in places where it seemed to be too hot in summer or too cold in winter for running to be pleasant.  That left me with a list containing … nothing!  So I had to revise my opinion of what was too hot or too cold.  I ended up applying to three programs, in biostatistics at the University of Washington (UW) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and in statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).  The last of those was because a colleague at UNISA had spent a sabbatical there and spoke highly of the program.

In order to apply to those graduate programs I first had to take the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) and the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).  I thought the latter requirement was a bit of a cheek considering that (a) English is my mother tongue and (b) the language used in the US should be called American because it is not standard English.  I don’t recall where I took those exams, though it must have been somewhere in either Pretoria or Johannesburg.  I must have done well enough to persuade at least one university that I wasn’t a total idiot.

The UW had had a small entering class in their graduate programs in the 1989/1990 academic year.  Because I already had a master’s degree in statistics they offered me a place in their program starting in the middle of the academic year.  The offer including “full support”, that is, reasonable financial assistance.  So we moved to Seattle in March of 1990.  At that stage UNC was still trying to determine whether my math background was adequate for entry into their program.  I don’t recall whether I ever heard back from UTEP.

University of Washington admission letter

We found an apartment within the first few days and settled in.  That December we saw snow falling for the first time.  I was 36 years old and had never seen snow falling or even touched fresh snow (we’d seen some old snow when we’d gone on a hike back in April or May).  For the first few hours it was very exciting, but by the next day when the whole city had shut down and we were trapped inside it was no longer so wonderful.  I had gone downtown to do Christmas shopping and returned just as the snow began.  The timing and the amount of snow caught the city by surprise.  By the evening commute the snow was already quite deep.  Many people were trapped in their cars and took hours to get home, some not making it until the next day.  Buses were sliding down the steep Seattle hills.  It was a mess.  YouTube has several videos of cars and buses sliding in the snow on other occasions, such as this one (with a bus sliding at about 3:30 in):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhZCyQ3emQg

Google Street View of the apartment where we lived in Seattle.  Ours was the one of the ground floor to the right of the entrance.

Seeing snow fall for the first time was exciting

A few hours later it was still falling and soon becoming much less fun

The bus system in Seattle is excellent (except when the buses are sliding around in the snow).  We didn’t buy a car when we lived there.  We rented one on a few occasions to go on vacation and to be mobile for the period in 1992 when my father visited us and Lisa was about to be born.  My father and his new wife came to see us (and my brother Mick) in the US on their honeymoon.  Shortly after returning to South Africa my father had his first stroke.  (He had a few more before passing away almost 5 years later.)

The “full support” would have been adequate to live on if I had been single.  One of the conditions of my student visa was that Riëtta was not allowed to work.  With our savings and the money my mother had left me running out, plus a now-expanded family, we couldn’t afford to stay in Seattle.  Having received sabbatical support from UNISA, I was contractually obliged to return there for at least 6 months.  So in June 1993 we reluctantly headed back to Pretoria.  The reluctance was mostly because we had grown very fond of Seattle.

Some students in the UW Department of Biostatistics who had moved away from Seattle took a long time to finish their PhDs, with some bumping up against the university’s 10-year limit.  So I was sent an official letter outlining the department’s concerns about me leaving the area.

University of Washington warning letter

In Pretoria once again

Back in Pretoria we rented a house a few blocks from my father.  As we didn’t expect to stay there very long, we didn’t buy a car but borrowed one from my father.  (He had recovered reasonably well, though not completely, from his first stroke and managed to return to work for a while.)

Steven had completed his first year of school in Seattle.  It was the middle of the South African school year when we moved back.  Initially when we tried to get him into a nearby public school they wanted him to wait until the next school year because he wasn’t quite 6 yet.  But we persuaded them that as he had already had a full year of schooling that didn’t make sense and they relented and allowed him in.

 

On to Hobart

At some point towards the end of our time in Seattle a notice had appeared on our department’s noticeboard saying that Terry Dwyer, the Director of the Menzies Center for Population Health Research (as it was then called, now the Menzies Institute for Medical Research), an epidemiology research center at the University of Tasmania, would be visiting the UW and any biostatistics student who was interested in a job in Australia could meet him for lunch.  I was the only one who turned up.  Terry was also a runner and we ended up talking more about running than work.  He was a shorter distance runner and 10K was about the upper limit of his racing, whereas it was towards the lower end of mine.  Our best times for 10K (or 10,000m on the track) were almost identical.  Apart from being a medical doctor and professor of Epidemiology, Terry was also involved in athletic administration.  In our time in Hobart he served as President of Athletics Tasmania, the governing body for track and field in the state, and later was President of Athletics Australia, the corresponding body for the whole country.

Terry asked me to apply for a position at the Menzies Center, with our lunch together serving as my interview.  Again, I was at the right place, at the right time, with the right qualifications (right 10K time?).  A few months later I was offered the position.  So we then made plans to pack up again for the move to Australia.  We first had to get temporary residence permits approved.  The paperwork came through eventually and we left South Africa in February 1994.

University of Tasmania offer 

We quickly found a house to rent in Hobart and bought a car.  (We became friendly with Geoff and Helen, the couple from whom we rented the house.  Geoff was also a runner and he and Riëtta often dueled in races.)  We got Steven enrolled in a nearby school.  That meant that in less than 12 months he had been in schools in three countries.  Fortunately he adapted well.

I was still working on my dissertation, corresponding with my advisor, Margaret Pepe, by email.  Margaret had also gone to the US as a graduate student, from Ireland.  She is at least 5 years younger than me!  She was a great advisor and very patient.  In November 1994, a couple of months after I had turned 40, I flew back to Seattle for my final (oral) exam and to turn in my dissertation.  Fortunately I passed the exam and, more importantly, didn’t have to make any last-minute changes to the dissertation.  (Passing the final exam for a PhD is usually a formality.  Although it may be nerve-wracking, an advisor shouldn’t let a student take the exam unless the student is ready.  So about the only time a student may fail is if he/she insists on taking the exam before the advisor thinks he/she is ready.)

The Menzies Centre was doing important work.  Their research contributed substantially to the SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) death rate declining to about one third of what it had been just a few years earlier.  (The size and scope of the organization has increased substantially in the years since I left.)  I learned a lot in my time there, particularly about epidemiology and about the vagaries of data collection.  I have never regretted dragging the family off to the far end of the earth.

While at the Menzies Centre I came to realize how important it is for a statistician to have a good understanding of how the data in a study are actually collected – not just how they are supposed to be collected.  That helps provide insight into the sources of variability in the data and what kinds of errors can occur.  You would probably be surprised by how easily things can be screwed up, even for something as supposedly elementary as measuring height.  One of our studies was of exercise induced asthma in young children.  We measured their lung function before and after having them run for a few minutes.  Lung function is dependent on body size, so we needed to measure their heights.  We had a stadiometer that we were planning to use for the height measurements.  Our stadiometer had a fixed scale for very short heights, and a sliding part to use beyond that.  The kids were of an age at which some of them were measurable with the fixed part of the stadiometer while for others we needed to use the sliding part.  Whoever had assembled the stadiometer had messed something up, so that the sliding part gave incorrect readings.  The instructions had been lost and I couldn’t fix the instrument to work correctly.  So I said we should stick a tape measure against a wall and use that.  Once the pilot study was over and the real study began, some bright spark decided that as we had a stadiometer, it should be used rather than the tape measure.  Whoever made that decision didn’t tell me.  When it came time to analyze the results the heights were a mess.  Many of the kids had become shorter than when they had been measured a couple of years earlier!  That obviously shouldn’t happen with kids in the age range 6-9 years.  So the data were essentially unusable.

A stadiometer – not the same as the one we used

Tasmania is very scenic and is a great place to visit.  Living there year-round is less pleasant.  It is rather isolated and the weather is often poor as it is situated slap-bang in the middle of the Roaring Forties.  I was the only PhD-level biostatistician in the state and being a newly-minted PhD I didn’t have anyone who could mentor me professionally.  So I started to look for other positions, either elsewhere in Australia or in the US.  Another factor was that we had done some house-hunting in Hobart but couldn’t find anything affordable that was reasonably well built.  If we’d managed to buy a house we might still have been there now.  Further, public schools in Tasmania are not very good, particularly in the higher grades, and we couldn’t afford to send our kids to private schools.  The running scene was also rather primitive, reminiscent of that in South Africa 15+ years earlier.

I applied unsuccessfully for at least one position elsewhere in Australia, I think it was in Newcastle.  I probably have a rejection letter packed away somewhere, or maybe the advertisement for the job.  I also applied and was flown over to the US for an interview at the University of Arizona in Tucson.  A year or so later I was invited for another interview at the University of Arizona.  This time I took the family along too for a vacation.  Apart from going to Tucson, we went to Disney World (and Gatorland) and to Seattle.  Shortly before leaving for the US I applied for a position in the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  They interviewed me by telephone and when they heard I was going to be in the US, invited me for an in-person interview.  (They wouldn’t have paid for me to fly all the way from Tasmania, though were willing to pay for a flight from Seattle.  So, again, I was going to be in more-or-less the right place at the right time with the right qualifications.)  We hastily changed our plans, with the rest of the family flying home from Seattle and me first going on to Chapel Hill.  My interview was on a Friday and Monday, straddling the weekend in which UNC was playing in the 1998 NCAA Final Four (basketball, for those who don’t know – which I certainly didn’t).  I was told that if UNC won there would be big parties in downtown Chapel Hill and I would hear plenty of noise.  UNC lost in the semi-final, so I didn’t get to hear/see what the celebrations are like.

I ended up being offered positions by both the University of Arizona and UNC.  I think UNC offered somewhat more money.  A bigger factor was that Arizona didn’t have a school of public health yet and I would have been in a very small biostatistics group, whereas UNC had a highly ranked school of public health and a large and well-regarded Department of Biostatistics.  So I accepted the UNC offer.

UNC offer

Moving to Chapel Hill

 We left Hobart in the depths of winter.  The rest of the family first went to Pretoria for a week while I tidied up various loose ends in Australia.  I then joined them in Pretoria and we flew out the same day.  We arrived in Chapel Hill in early August.  Moving from winter to the heat and humidity of summer in North Carolina was quite a shock.  For the first few days I was desperately unhappy, not just because of the weather but also other factors such as how run-down the building that housed the CSCC was.  Many of the (sealed) windows leaked when it rained and I was issued with plastic sheeting to put over my office computer when it rained.  The office furniture should have been surplussed decades earlier.  We didn’t have proper computer desks, just very old desks with computers plonked on top.  I wanted to head straight back to Hobart.  Fortunately the rest of the family vetoed that idea.

 We found a place to rent, bought a car, and got the kids enrolled in schools, ready for the new academic year.  Steven was ready to go into middle school.  Lisa had started school earlier that year in Hobart.  Near the end of the first school year the Chapel Hill/Carrboro school district released plans for redistricting for the next school year.  (One is assigned to schools based on where one lives, but the catchment areas are updated periodically as new schools are opened because of demographic changes.)  Lisa was going to have to move to a school much further away.  We hadn’t been thinking of buying a house, but this prompted us to start house-hunting.  We managed to find one that we could afford and, a big plus, that was zoned for the schools that Steven and Lisa were attending.  An added plus was that the house was within walking distance of the two schools.  A move that didn’t involve going to another country or even another city?  That was a first for us.  We moved into our house in June 1999 and have been here ever since.  Chapel Hill turned out to be a great place for the kids to grow up, with one of the best public school systems in the US.  They also both went on to do their undergraduate degrees at UNC before moving to more exciting cities.

Our house in Chapel Hill

In the first few years here I was sometimes very frustrated by the CSCC leadership and UNC more generally.  For instance, they made minimal effort to help us obtain permanent residence status, even though it was in their interests if they wanted to keep me.  At one point I applied for a position at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.  They flew the whole family out for an interview and eventually offered me a position.  But they didn’t yet have a school of public health or a biostatistics department and it wasn’t clear that I would be any better off.  So we stayed put.

I’ve had a couple ore interviews since then, both after I had been contacted by a recruiter rather than me looking for a new position.  One of them was with a private company in this area.  They made me a quite substantial offer.  We had had a change of leadership in our center and department.  Our department chair immediately made me a counter-offer.  It wasn’t as much as I was being offered, but that they bothered to counter so quickly showed that they cared and that was part of the reason I turned down the position.  Another interview was in the Washington, DC, area.  I was reluctant even to go for the interview, but they were quite persistent.  However, just after that there was a leadership change in their organization and maybe because of that, plus my expressed reluctance, they didn’t make me an offer.  I wasn’t disappointed.  Now I expect to stay where I am until I retire (or am fired).

Although I don’t expect to move to another job, at some point we may move house, perhaps to a nearby retirement community, before I go to my final resting place.  For the latter I presume I will once again be in the right place, with the right qualifications and hope it will be right time – neither too early nor too late.

Our old neighborhood, part 2

Disclaimer:  Being autobiographical, these entries depend on my memory of events around half a century ago.  I didn’t take any notes or keep a diary (either then or now).  Being a time before digital cameras (and because I was very camera-shy), I don’t even have photos to serve as reminders.  Why write a disclaimer for this particular episode?  I mention more names of living people than in most previous episodes.  I am happy to correct any facts or add extra details that those who are mentioned point out.  Opinions are my own and others may have different perspectives.  I would also be happy to include differing perspectives of those who are willing to share them.

First, a somewhat related public health message.  Make sure you get all recommended immunizations.  The polio vaccine, for instance, has now eliminated the threat of that often-serious disease from much of the world, including Europe and the Americas. 

How is this somewhat-related to the topic of our old neighborhood?  Stewart and Shirley McCurdie were friends of my parents who weren’t quite in our neighborhood.  They and their children (the oldest, Ron, being a little older than me, if I remember correctly) at one stage lived a couple of blocks away from us, on the other side of Cape Road, a major arterial which at that point has Fen Glen on one side and Cotswold on the other.  At some point in the ’60s Shirley McCurdie contracted polio.  I think she was even in an iron lung at one stage.  Although she mostly recovered, after that she always walked with a limp.  I recently managed to re-establish contact with Ron on Facebook.  He now lives in Limoges, France.

Cape Road is labelled near the top of the image, towards the right.  Even back then I think there were two lanes in each direction, with a center island (and in this stretch, a service road running parallel to the main road). 

Back to our side of Cape Road. 

The Swarts

In the previous episode there was an open lot where the house marked 2 below now stands.  I don’t know exactly when that house was built but from a date mentioned below it must have been completed before 1962.  The couple who lived there from the time the house was built and for as long as my parents were in Port Elizabeth were Oscar and Ruth Swart.  Oscar was an Afrikaner who worked for the Post Office.  Ruth was a nurse.  She was a German Jew and with her sister Inge were the only members of their family who survived the Holocaust.  Although I knew that at the time, it wasn’t until recently that I found out how they had managed to get out of Nazi Germany – on the Kindertransport to Britain (Glasgow in their case) when Ruth was 13 and Inge 8.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindertransport.  More on that below.  I also hadn’t known until then how Ruth and Oscar had met.  They met when they were both on vacation in Switzerland.  Oscar was touring Europe for 6 months with some friends.  Ruth eventually decided to emigrate to South Africa (from Britain).

Ruth and Oscar had a son, Anthony, born in 1958, so about a year younger than my brother Mick.  They had a second son, Jonathan, who was born in 1962.  Jonathan has Down syndrome (trisomy 21).  Children with Down syndrome often have congenital heart disease and other health problems.  Life expectancy used to be quite short (25 years in the 1980s according to Wikipedia) though is now 50-60 years in the developed world.  Apart from Down syndrome itself, Jonathan was healthy and is now in his late 50s. 

One day Ruth came over to our house, absolutely devastated, to tell my parents that Inge had died in an airplane crash.  I must have been just 7 year old, though I remember having met Inge a few times.  (I think Anthony used to refer to Inge as “Aunty Gaga”.)  I hadn’t known when or where the crash occurred until I managed to make contact with Anthony a few years ago.  From information he gave me I was able to find accounts of the accident, which happened soon after taking off from Douala Airport in Cameroon on March 4, 1962, with the loss of all 111 passengers and crew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonian_Airways_Flight_153

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19620304-0

My father sometimes referred to Oscar as the ancient mariner, because when Oscar started talking to my father it was hard to get him to stop.  Oscar became interested in horticulture and constructed large hothouses in their back yard.  He eventually had at least two, maybe three.  They aren’t visible in the Google Maps image, so I presume they were demolished at some stage in the past 40 years.

Oscar passed away in about 1982, quite soon after my parents left Port Elizabeth, and Ruth in 2014 aged 89.  Considering that Ruth left Germany at the age of 13, it is surprising that she still had a strong German accent more than 50 years later.  Despite all she went through, I never heard her express any bitterness and she spent her whole working life caring for other people.  She was a good person.  While that is true of most people I have known, few of them have had to cope with what she went through.

Anthony is now a realtor (what South Africans refer to as a “real estate agent”).  When I first re-established contact with him about 4 years ago he mentioned that he is married to Karel and that they’d been together for 30 years.  Although our families lived next door to one another for 20 years, I hadn’t realized back then that he was gay.  Maybe that’s partly because the old South Africa was a rather homophobic society, so he didn’t come out.  In late 2006 South Africa became the fifth country in the world to legalize marriages between same-sex couples!  Anthony also wrote “You know I’ve got a German passport and have at times thought about leaving here, but our lifestyle is still too good to even really consider a major move?!!”

Photo of Anthony Swart from his realtor web page.

The Parrys

In the previous episode I mentioned that the people in the house marked 8 had two sons, one of whom had Down syndrome and died young.  (South Africa doesn’t have a particularly high incidence of Down syndrome.  It is just a coincidence that neighbors on either side of us had a son with Down syndrome.) 

I don’t recall if there was another family that lived there after that but before Errol and Margaret Parry moved in with their three children – Neville, who is my age, Gail, who is a couple of years younger, and Kim, who is several more years younger.  Their address was 366 Cape Road and to help people remember the number Margaret Parry used to refer to it as Leap Year Cape Road.  I think they occasionally even had mail addressed to them like that.  Margaret also sometimes used to use the expression “what doesn’t kill, fattens”.  Although I was a chubby youngster, I didn’t associate “fattens” with being bad and thought she was contrasting a bad versus a good outcome!

Margaret and Errol Parry are on the right in this photo taken after my father’s funeral.

  

Neville and I quickly became good friends.  We played a lot of backyard cricket together, usually just the two of us.  Backyard cricket is part of the folklore of Australia in particular, but also most of the other main cricket-playing countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_cricket  We usually played at the Parrys’ house, in which case it was sideyard cricket rather than backyard, with the wicket running north to south parallel with the words “Malvern Ave” in the image from Google Maps.  We pretended to be the great players of that and earlier eras, including those who played for the then-mighty West Indies – fearsome fast bowlers Wesley (later Sir Wes) Hall and Charlie Griffith, wonderful batsmen such as Rohan Kanhai and Clive (now Sir Clive) Lloyd, and Garfield (now Sir Garry) Sobers, still regarded as the greatest al-rounder ever to have played the game.  Apart from a few of the South African stars, we didn’t ever get to see any of these players in action, either live or on TV.  At that stage of the Apartheid era the government would not allow black players, such as the West Indians, to play against.  Also, the country didn’t get TV until the mid 1970s, when the government woke up to the fact that state-controlled television is a powerful propaganda weapon.

<Aside>

White South African cricket administrators later began throwing money around, paying players from other countries to participate in “rebel” tours.  They even managed to pay a group of West Indian players to tour.  The latter were probably poorly advised.  Although they were mostly near the end of their careers and may have thought it was an opportunity to cash in before retiring, they may not have been fully aware that not only would they subsequently be banned from playing cricket in their own countries again, but also that many would actually become outcasts back home. 

This article is about a “rebel” team from the West Indies:  https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/21298477/the-unforgiven  

This one describes the lead-up to a tour by a team from England:

https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/22754920/the-dirty-dozen

In this one it is clear from the Australian players themselves that they were generally past their primes.  http://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/959689/-prime-minister-hawke-called-us-traitors

My opinion at the time was that the “rebel” tours were misguided.  Even putting aside political issues, they weren’t going to provide a true reflection of the strength of (white) South African cricket.  If a touring team beat the South African team, then we would realize that we were no longer world beaters.  But if the South African team won (which it did in most instances), that wouldn’t tell us much – that we had beaten a team of mercenaries from another country, rather than the best team that that country had to offer.

</Aside>

Neville and I were very evenly matched in backyard cricket.  In the real thing?  It wasn’t even close.  He was much better and played at a high level through high school and beyond and he also excelled at rugby.  I had minimal athletic talent.  I played several sports with much enthusiasm but little ability.  In cricket I didn’t progress beyond intermural level at high school, and even in those inter-class games I was more of a liability than an asset.  (As I probably mentioned in an earlier episode, participation in sport was compulsory at our high school.  Intramural cricket was the default option in the warmer months for those of us who weren’t good enough to make one of the school’s many teams for cricket or any other sport.)

When the Parrys lived there in the ’60s, there was a structure, rather like an open carport, in front of a one-car garage, where I have drawn a red circle below.  There were brick/concrete pillars, with beams along the tops of the pillars and going across the driveway.  The beams across the driveway were probably spaced about 3 feet apart.  At one stage Neville and I built a “tree” house on top of these beams.  (What does one call a tree house if it isn’t in a tree??)  We even stayed in it overnight on at least one occasion, partly because my mother promised to bake us a chocolate cake if we spent the night up there.

The red circle indicates where Neville and I built a “tree” house.

My father used to keep some money in various drawers in their bedroom.  I found some of these places and, presuming he wouldn’t notice, took some of the money from time to time.  Well, he did notice and confronted me.  I confessed.  He was very angry – the only time I can recall him being really angry with me.  One of the things he said was “What would Neville think if he heard about this?”  Well, honor among thieves and all that, plus I didn’t want to rile my father up even further, so I didn’t mention where I had got the idea.  (Even later in my life I never said to my father “You remember when you caught me stealing money from your drawer and asked what Neville would think ….?”)

Soccer trading cards were big at one stage back then.  The cards came in “lucky packets” which had a couple of cards plus some candy.  A few players’ cards were rare and there were rumors about how many lucky packets one had to buy to have a good chance of getting these rare cards.  One of the things we did with the money I purloined was to buy a box containing a gross of lucky packets.  I/we reasoned that each box would include at least one card for every player.  (I obviously didn’t know much about probability theory back then.)  We bought the box and opened all of the lucky packets.  Although we found a few cards that we didn’t yet have in our collection, we didn’t get all the ones we had hoped for (and did end up with many, many, of the more common cards).  When we started to lose interest in collecting those cards Neville’s mother donated our collection to some organization.

Neville and I were in different primary schools.  Then we were at the same high school for what I think was just one year.  After that he went to boarding school at Graeme College, which his father had attended, for a couple of years.  In 1970 the Parrys moved to the Johannesburg area and he completed high school there.  After that I occasionally heard news of him through my parents, but didn’t have any direct contact with him until connecting with him on Facebook a while back.  He is now also part of the South African diaspora, living in Prague.  According to Linkedin he is Chairman of the “Woodcote Group a.s”, a company in Czech Republic, with head office in Prague and which operates in the Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services industry.  Neville’s sister Gail lives in Germany and his other sister, Kim, is still in South Africa, though I haven’t tried to make contact with either of them.  Their father, Errol, was (and presumably still is) a great character.  He turned 90 in 2019.

Neville Parry – profile photo “borrowed” from Facebook

The Ashbys

In the previous episode I mentioned that the people in the house marked 9 had a boogie man who lived in a shed at the bottom of the garden.  Later the Ashbys lived there – Ken, Tania and their children Kevin and Clifford.  I think Kevin is two years younger than me and Clifford another year or two younger, so they are closer in age to my brother Mick than to me.

A while back I found Kevin on Facebook.  He is in Brisbane (Australia).  He trained as a chemical engineer and is now a patent attorney.  Clifford doesn’t appear to be on Facebook but is on Linkedin, though he hasn’t uploaded a profile photo.  He is CEO of “Coleambally Irrigation Co-operative” in New South Wales, Australia, having previously been CEO of various other companies.

Kevin Ashby – profile photo “borrowed” from Facebook

The Toppers

At some point after the woman who enticed Marmalade the cat to move from our house to the one marked 5, the Toppers moved in.  I don’t recall the names of the parents, but there was a son, Desmond, who is my age.  Initially we were good friends.  We often used to play the strategy board game Risk.  It was his copy and he taught me/us the rules.  When we were later given our own copy, I read the rules carefully and found that they differed quite substantially from what Desmond had said.  (His version didn’t give anyone an unfair advantage, so it wasn’t that he was trying to cheat.)  Desmond and I both had Scalextric https://www.scalextric.com/us-en/ slot-car racing sets and we often combined our sets to make longer tracks.  (A new slot car is one of the things I bought with money purloined from my father.)

I said above that “initially” we were good friends.  Later Desmond formed a “gang” consisting of the younger boys in the neighborhood – my brothers, Anthony Swart and the Ashbys.  Neville and I were supposedly their rival gang.  We didn’t consider ourselves a gang and mostly just avoided the younger kids.  I think they used to “spy” on us, though we didn’t ever do anything worth spying on.  Recently I asked my brother Mick what he remembered of this “gang”.  He claimed not to recall who Desmond Topper was.  Maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of someone who in hindsight might have been a little like a cult leader.

It looks like Desmond is on Facebook.  I have sent him a message but haven’t had a response yet.  If it is the same Desmond Topper, he retired a couple of years ago, most recently having run IGCS (Industrial Gas Consultancy Services).  The web site for that doesn’t appear to exist now and even the Wayback Machine didn’t turn up anything, so maybe he was a solo consultant and shut down the web site when he retired.  Previously he was Regional Manager at the local branch of Air Liquide.

The Stirks

After the Parrys moved to Johannesburg, our new neighbors in the house marked 8 were Bill and Joan Stirk and their lovely your daughters, Sandra and Marilyn.  Sandy is about a year younger than me and Marilyn a further two years younger, making her the same age as my brother Mick.  They moved in some time in 1970.

Sandy and I hit it off for a short while.  Then the Stirks went away for two weeks on summer vacation.  I counted down the days (maybe even the minutes J) until their return.  But on their vacation Sandy found someone else.  My fragile sixteen-year-old heart was broken.  For a long while after that I hoped we could get back together, but it was not to be.  She occasionally agreed to go to a movie with me and even to the South African equivalent of my high school prom, but just as a friend.  I still often visited her after school and pestered her.  I don’t know why my parents (or hers) didn’t have a little word in my ear. 

I recall watching Wimbledon tennis matches on TV at the Stirks’ house.  That must have been several years later though, during winter break from college, because Port Elizabeth didn’t get TV until early 1976.  (Test transmissions in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban had started several months before that.)  My parents didn’t get a TV while we lived in Port Elizabeth, not because they couldn’t afford it but because they thought it was a waste of time.  Later my father became quite fond of some programs, particularly The Golden Girls.  While on the subject of early South African TV … for the 1976 Olympics all that was broadcast was a 30-minute highlights package each evening.  I remember nothing of what was shown, partly because it was hard to see anything through the throng of students crowded around the one set in our college dorm.  (After 1960 South Africa was barred from taking part in the Olympics until 1992.)

Somewhat surprisingly in hindsight, although I was unhappy about being dumped, I didn’t feel any resentment or jealousy towards Sandy’s new or subsequent boyfriends.  They were nice guys and better than me – certainly more dynamic.

Mick and Marilyn later started dating and I think that continued for at least two years.  I don’t know what caused them to break up, though going to colleges in different cities may have played a role.

After my parents sold their house in Port Elizabeth and moved to Pretoria I lost contact with Sandy and Marilyn for three decades!  Then in 2010, using the no-longer so new-fangled Internet that you may have read about, and remembering Marilyn’s married name, I found her email address on the web site for the Nelson Mandela University (previously called the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, and prior to that the University of Port Elizabeth), where she was lecturing in Physical Science education.  (I think she has since become the victim of a peculiar South African disease called “compulsory retirement”.  I understand the thinking behind that, creating more opportunities for younger people to advance, but it seems counter-productive for a country that has a shortage of highly qualified people in STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – fields.)  Marilyn replied to my email and also gave me Sandy’s email address.  Sandy is an elementary school teacher in Cape Town.  In my first message to her I apologized for having been such a pest when we were young.  It was great to catch up on news.  I later became Facebook friends with both of them and with Sandy’s husband, Julian.  When we were in South Africa in March 2019 we had a chance to meet up with Sandy and Julian.  Unfortunately we didn’t get to see Marilyn and her husband, Keith, when we were in Port Elizabeth.  Maybe if I go to my high school class’s 50-year reunion in a couple of years … 

Cape Town, March 2019, my “little” brother Ian, some old guy, Riëtta, Sandy and Julian.

Our old neighborhood, part 1

n an earlier episode I mentioned that my parents bought their first house in Fern Glen, Port Elizabeth.  We moved in when I was about 3 years old, in 1957.  At that stage there weren’t any houses south of the red line in the image below, just open veld.  The highway, William Moffet Expressway, at the right hand end of the red line, hadn’t been constructed and there was no road of any description through the Baakens River valley at that point. 

Most of the roads in Fern Glen, including the one past our house, were still unpaved.  A grader used to come by occasionally to smooth out the gravel surface.  It wasn’t until several years later that the roads were paved.  In contrast, for the development below the red line paved roads were put in and stood idle for a few years before any houses were built.  

The fancy-pants label “Fernglen Forest” is recent – it definitely wasn’t called that when we lived there.  (And none of those businesses that Google shows were there even by the time my parents sold the house in 1979.)

Google Maps image of Fern Glen.  The superimposed red 1 indicates our old house.

At about the point marked with a red 2 was the open end of a large concrete storm-water pipe.  My friends and I sometimes crawled a short distance into that, or looked for small fish and crabs in the water.  We didn’t go very far into the pipe.  I have since heard from some of my contemporaries that they explored extensively inside such pipes in other parts of the city.

Not only were there no houses (or roads) south of the red line, but the vegetation in the veld was mostly scrub, whereas now it is more substantial.  The first of the photos below was taken when we visited the area in March 2019.  It shows the view looking west from from the point marked with a red star on the Google Maps image.  The photo shows much more substantial vegetation than existed back in the day.  The second image is from Google Street View, at the same point and in the same direction.  That’s somewhat more like the veld used to look.  The third photo was also taken in March 2019, aiming south from the same point.  The name “Upper Guineafowl Trail” is recent.  Not only was it not called that back then, I don’t even remember seeing guineafowl there, though I often walked my dog or ran through that area.  Part of the reason there was less vegetation in the ’60s and ’70s may be that back then there were occasional veld-fires that burned back most of the scrub.  The fires sometimes came worryingly close to the houses. 

Photo taken in March 2019

 Image in the same direction from Google Street View

Photo taken in March 2019

A few trails are visible in the Google Maps image.  There used to be many more, crisscrossing the veld, made by people walking to and from the ‘coloured’ township of Fairview, which was on the other side of the Baakens River valley, south of the part shown in the Google Maps image.  I knew that most of these people were forced to move out of Fairview at some point but I didn’t know when until I searched the Internet for information.  I found the following Master of Arts dissertation “More than an Apartheid loss: Recovering and Remembering Fairview, a ‘lost’ Group Areas history” by Inge Salo, from my alma mater (the University of Cape Town).  The quotes below are from the dissertation:

https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/13746/thesis_hum_2014_salo_i.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Fairview was declared a “white” area in terms of the Group Areas Act in 1968.  Removals of the people who had been living there took place between 1969 and 1973.  (There were other parts of Port Elizabeth and Cape Town where local residents were moved to make way for “whites”, District Six in Cape Town being the most famous.  In many instances these communities had been living harmoniously adjacent to “white” areas.  The forced removals obviously caused much resentment, fracturing the communities and moving people much further from employment and other opportunities.) 

“For all former residents who had to leave Fairview described the removals as a traumatic experience. If not personally, because they were too young to grasp what was happening, then certainly for their parents.”

A quote from a former resident:

“It was hard, it was hard, as I said my husband didn't want to move, he didn't want to move…You know....the day when we moved people from ‘Joburg’ [Johannesburg], English people, ‘nie Boere nie’ [not Afrikaners] … they bought the house, while we were in the house they bought the house, and they were waiting for us, sitting in the car outside wait[ing] for us to get out”

Although the ruling National Party government had overwhelming support from (white) Afrikaners, there were also plenty of English-speaking whites who supported Apartheid.  Essentially all white South Africans of that era benefitted to at least some extend from Apartheid, even those who opposed the system.

From the dates given above, the removals must have been taking place while I was in high school.  I probably didn’t read newspapers back then and wasn’t really aware of the removals.  After I went off to university in Cape Town and later to compulsory military service, I do remember on trips back home during breaks seeing that buildings in Fairview had been razed and that no new development occurred while my parents were still in Port Elizabeth.

“After the majority of its residents were forcibly removed, Fairview stood scarred and under-populated for almost a decade before development finally began (Evening Post, 14 March 1989). This is depicted best in the 1980 aerial photograph of Fairview (Figure 6) in which there are visibly a lot less buildings and houses and more trees that fill the empty spaces.”

In contrast, District Six remained mostly undeveloped from the time the old buildings were razed until the end of the Apartheid era.

Back to more pleasant memories …

Below is a closer view of the area around our house.  (In a later episode there are even closer views.  I have kept the numbering the same across the image below and those in the later episode.  For instance, the red 1 always indicates our house.)  In 1957 when we moved in, it wasn’t just the area below the red line in the image near the top of this episode, some of the houses marked below hadn’t been built yet.  What were then still initially vacant lots include where there are now houses indicated with a 2 and a 6.  Most of the other houses were already there, including 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9.  Even many of the ones that were there have been modified substantially in the past 40+ years.  There were no swimming pools in the area in 1960 either.

The house marked 6 was a vacant lot for many years.  A few days ago I remembered something about it that I hadn’t thought of for more than 50 years.  While the lot was still vacant some of the older kids in the neighborhood cleared much of the vegetation and made a cricket pitch in the middle of the lot.  I have no recollection of the names of the other kids who played cricket on that makeshift field.

The house marked 2 was built just a few years after we moved in.  One day while the lot was still vacant, one of my mother’s friends, Betty van Tonder came for a brief visit.  Betty had two daughters, Annette and Frances.  The visit was intended to be so brief that Betty left her daughters in the car, which was parked out in the street (with the engine off).  We were standing the front yard when one of the girls managed to release the handbrake and the car started rolling down the rather steep hill.  (Either the car had been left in neutral or one of the girls had managed to get it into neutral.  As is still the case today, most South African cars have a manual gearbox – what Americans refer to as a stick shift – rather than an automatic one.)  Fortunately they managed to steer into the vacant lot rather than going straight down the hill.  Betty ran to try to stop the car and fell (or was hit) breaking a leg.  The bushes in the lot eventually stopped the car.

All I remember about when the house marked 2 was being built was that one of the workers was rather overweight and we kids rather nastily referred to him as “Fatty Boom Boom”.  More on the people who moved into house 2 in the next episode.

The people who were in the house marked 3 were the Drennans.  They moved out after a few years.  About all I remember is that they had a son, Evan, who was several years older than me.  I managed to find Evan on yesterday Facebook.  He remembered our family and noted that my father was master of ceremonies at his wedding in 1973!  Evan said they moved away in 1964 when his father was appointed to a position at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, about 80 miles from Port Elizabeth.  (Grahamstown is now called Makhanda but, somewhat surprisingly, Rhodes University hasn’t changed its name, at least not ).  In searching for information I came across this article mentioning Evan and others being savaged by a dog:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BanPitBulls/comments/959mfr/dog_killed_and_4_adults_attacked_3_severely/

The Heines lived in the house marked 4 for several years.  They had 4 sons, the second of whom, Bryan, was at school with me from pre-school through 12^th grade.  He is the only high school classmate whose wedding I attended.  The Heines moved about a mile away, probably when we were still in elementary school.  The father was an owner of Heine and Strydom, a company that operated breakdown trucks (tow trucks) and currently sells car parts, though I don’t know if it did the latter back then.  The father died tragically in a boating accident at some time in the ’70s.

At one stage we had a marmalade cat called Marmalade.  The cat later disappeared.  According to my mother a woman living in the house marked 5 enticed the cat to move there.  More on a subsequent resident of that house in the next episode.

The Doubells lived in the house marked 7.  My father had what seemed to be a running battle with Mr. Doubell.  Not a physical battle, I should note.  The Doubells sometimes hosted noisy parties, which disturbed my father’s sleep.  I suspect that on some occasions he called the police to complain about the noise.  Mr. Doubell had a racing car – like a Formula 1 car (what Americans refer to as an open-wheel car) that he sometimes drove up and down our street.  It was probably not licensed for use on public roads and my father complained about that too (maybe even to the police).  Evan Drennan reminded me that the Du Preez family, who lived next to the Doubells, had a baboon that sometimes used to escape.  In recent years I have seen some of my Facebook friends from Port Elizabeth mention attending wild parties at the Doubells’ house!

The first residents I recall the house marked 8 had two sons.  I don’t recall the name of the family or of the sons.  One son was about my age and we used to play together.  The other son was younger and had Down syndrome.  That son died while the family was still living next to us.  More on subsequent residents of that house in the next episode.

In our early years in the neighborhood there were two older boys living in the house marked 9.  I sometimes climbed over the fence between our houses to play with them (the fences of 4 of the houses met at that point).  There used to be a shed at the bottom of their yard.  A boogie man (bogeyman) lived in the shed.  At least that’s what the kids who lived there told me.  Who was I to doubt them, especially as I even saw the boogie man on a few occasions!  It probably wasn’t until after that family had moved that I realized what was supposedly the boogie man was one of the older kids wearing a deep sea diving suit similar to the one in the photo below.  When one is very young it is quite scary when a creature like that comes lumbering towards one.  More on the subsequent residents of that house in the next episode.

A diving suit, similar to the one that the people in the house marked 9 had in their shed.