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Don & Marrae', 1970.
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Keet Seal trip, 1971.
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At one point in Marrae's life she helped her father, Ray, in building up Beacon Electronics, a large electronics store in Hawthorne, California. She had some experience in real estate sales and was a well organized business person. She helped Ray as his accountant, with secretarial duties and counter work. Ray sold the store about 1962 to Newark Electronics, a very large electronics wholesaler in Inglewood.
Marrae' then went to work at TRW in Manhattan Beach about that time as an administrative secretary and became active in the TRW equestrian club, her primary interest in quarter horse training and showing. There we met and were married in Silverton, Colorado, in December of 1970.
An interesting anecdote occurred with respect to our marriage in Silverton, an old mining town in SW Colorado. We had planned on getting married on December 7th so I wouldn't forget any anniversaries. We teased that since this was the second marriage for each of us we didn't want to get married in the Glass Church in Palos Verdes, nor did we want to go to Las Vegas or Tijuana. We called a priest in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, but found he wouldn't marry us because we were both divorced, although he would overlook that fact if we would contribute $500 to the church.
We had both been to Silverton once before; it was a very small mining town in a small valley of the San Juan mountains of SW Colorado at about 9,000, with a winter population of 50 in those days. Colorado also had "no waiting period" for marriages; that was ideal because we couldn't be gone long from work or home. So, Silverton it was to be.
We arrived in Durango, the county seat, and went to the city hall to obtain our license and were informed that indeed they had no waiting period; however, it would take three days for the blood test! We went over to the hospital for the blood test. When I was talking to the nurse she suddenly said, "Do you have two daughters, Beverly and Barbara?" I was a little surprised but said, "Yes. But how did you know?" She said, "I used to baby sit for you when you lived in Torrance 12 years ago; we lived on the street behind you." We both exchanged suprised comments, etc., and then she said, "I have to wait up tonight for a delivery; I'll run your tests and have them ready in the morning at 7 a.m." She did, and off we went to Silverton and were married the next day on the 8th. We had a bangup wedding, the whole town turned out, all 50 of them.
They threw a party with dancing, to a juke box, poems were read dedicated to our future together, etc. She got into a long conversation with a cowboy from Texas who had just brought some horses to the area about the difference between horses and mules. Marrae' decided to take the defense of mules as being a better animal all around. Someone asked her to dance, hoping to spirit her away so they could have a shivaree. However, she had enough to drink all she could only repeat over and over, "I love Donald". Evidently that was enough to thwart the proposed event.
Interesting note: Silverton had 14 feet of snow the winter before; when we were there in 1970 there wasn't more than 3 inches; but that's the SW Colorado mountains for you.
About July of 1971 TRW experienced a rather radical layoff of personnel because of the cutback of the NASA Space Program. TRW had retained personnel until the last and when the layoff occurred the unemployment situation in Los Angeles was at its peak, about 12%, mostly engineers and support personnel. Marrae's dad offered us about 25 acres of property around Klamath Fall, Oregon, with an old motel on it, and we had a small dream of rebuilding the motel and retiring to the area. We both volunteered for layoff, THEN took a trip to the area to look things over. To our dismay the "motel" was in a flood plain alongside the Klamath River and most of the buildings had been destroyed in a flood about 5 years before. The rest of the 25 acres was either straight up, or straight down, and virtually unusable. We quickly returned to TRW to retract our layoff request but found it too late, and we became part of the 12% unemployed in Southern California until moving to Los Alamos nine months later.
I had worked at The Aerospace Corporation as an electronics technician and developed a strong friendship with a physicist there. The physicist had earlier gone to the Los Alamos Scientific Labs in New Mexico and was able to help me secure employment there in the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, a half mile long linear accelerator being constructed at the time. We put the house up for sale and moved there in September of 1971. We had already purchased a 2.5 acre lot in a rural area and began construction of a house almost immediately.
Los Alamos, NM, at 7,500 foot elevation, typically gets about two feet of snow, but it seldom lasts from one snowfall till the next. We were campers so decided to move into a Bandelier National Monument campground site; there was virtually NO housing in Los Alamos at the time and we could receive $120 a day per-diem for 30 days, or until "adequate housing" could be found for ourselves, 2 teenagers, 2 dogs, and 2 cats. We planned to spend that living allowance on a kitchen for a house we planned to build. However, this was not a typical fall/winter for the area. The first day it snowed about 4", the next it rained, then snow for 2 days, then rain the next. That weekend a very soggy, bedraggled family moved into a 12'x12' motel room. Los Alamos had about 4 feet of snow that year, and it didn't dissipate from one snow to another!
Luckily, 2 weeks later the builder finished the garage, with attached bath, about that time so everyone moved into the garage. We were fairly cozy with the arrangement because the garage also had the home's forced-air heater in it, a 100,000 btu unit. But, from there we could handily work on the barn and stalls for 2 horses. Marrae' quickly became involved in the area's 4-H activities and started teaching western riding lessons to teenagers in the area.
Unfortunately the marriage went on the rocks shortly thereafter. Marrae' kept the house and horses but couldn't manage the finances as she had hoped. She expanded on the stable with the hopes of renting space to horse owners in the area, but that didn't altogether help. She got involved with a rowdy bunch of "cowboys" in the area and was killed one night while riding in a car that was involved in a drag race.
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