John Saunders

Until Pauline moved, I had to live in a rented apartment. We sold the East Hartford house easily, since it had a view, and bought a custom-built single-story house in White Oak, near the Baltimore-Washington road and the beltway. It did have a full basement, in which I constructed my electronics room and a studio for a student.

Amecom turned out to be a troubled place to work. It had many employees displaced from Long Island, New York where Litton had closed a factory. Of course, the better employees there had found other jobs locally. I had been hired because of my multiplexing experience, since Litton had made a multiplexed communication system for the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, which was having problems in the field. We were not long in Maryland: Amecom laid me off the day my fix for the equipment's problems was signed off for production.

Pauline went back to work, but did not go back to social administration because of the poor pay. Building on her Connecticut success in phone work she first worked for an employment placing agency. Later she got her big break beating out 40 other applicants for a field supervisor's position for Arbitron, the Radio and TV station ratings company. She stayed there until retirement.

In Connecticut and in Maryland I was a keen jogger and cyclist. I was bothered by chronic leg pain, which long resisted diagnosis and cure. Eventually it turned out to be sciatica in the lower back, and ceased when I gave up jogging.

One of the reasons that influenced me to move to the Washington area was the prospect of more employment opportunities. My job search there however was fruitless for over a month. Eventually, I got two offers in December 1976. One was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the other in San Diego, California. Since it was below freezing in Iowa, and I had been wishing to go to San Diego since I had first visited it fifteen years ago, I jumped at the chance. In the first week of 1977, I set off on the long journey in the Saab I had bought in Connecticut, taking the southern route after passing through the snowy pass into Tennessee.

Pauline said she would follow after the end of the school year, but after I was set up in California she balked, citing the poor schools in California. I divorced her in 1978.