When Eva and I got married, we had no wedding plans, including a date prior to Wednesday night, before our wedding three days later. We did not even have an apartment to move into after the wedding. We could not meet with our pastor until after the Wednesday night service, so we took the newspaper and went looking for an apartment. We found an apartment that looked new, not far off I-610 on Mangum Road. It was a 3rd-floor apartment, but we were young, so that was not a problem. We paid a deposit and the first month’s rent and then went to buy furniture.
I worked for Gulf Oil and drove to Port Arthur on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, leaving for work at 4:30 a.m. on those days. Friday night of that first week, Eva told me that someone had tried to come into our apartment each morning after I left early to go to work. When we talked to the apartment manager, she refused to change the lock or let us change apartments. We moved to another apartment project that weekend and lost two months’ rent.
Our new apartment was smaller and an older building than where we had been, but it was owned by a couple who lived in a house next to the apartments. It was safer, and most of the families had been there for years. Two months later, I quit working for Gulf and started working at NASA at the Manned Spacecraft Center, making the 100-mile round-trip to work each day. A few months later, the apartment owners finished building some new apartments next to where we were living, but they were having difficulties getting HL&P to install everything so that power could be turned on.
JoAnn worked for HL&P at that time, and she made everything happen for the owners, and they gave us the first choice of the two-bedroom units. A few months later, we signed a contract to build our first home, and the apartment owners allowed us to live there monthly until our house was completed.
We had our first house built in a new development that only had three homes under construction at that time, and our property was on the last street. HL&P would not give our builder a date for power to be available, and we were getting concerned that we might not be able to get it completed without long delays. JoAnn was still working at HL&P, and then a few days later, power poles were being installed on all the streets back to our property.
We moved into our new home on Christmas Eve 1965, thanks to JoAnn. Now you know the rest of the story.
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