The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 2

I stepped off the plane at the old Jacksonville airport expecting the worst. It was after dark and August’s heat and humidity wrapped me in its stifling embrace. I herded my mother and brothers and sisters down the airplane stairs, across the tarmac, and into the terminal. I greeted my Dad and complained about the heat. “You get used to it,” he said.

We loaded kids and luggage into our Ford Falcon station wagon and headed to a motel as it was getting late and the babies were crying and the rest of us were cranky. We drove by a car and its window was wide open and the guy driving was not wearing a shirt. Seems ridiculous to remember that decades later but in Colorado or anywhere else in the West I had never seen a guy driving without a shirt. We landed at a motel and my brother Dan and I saw a family swimming in the pool. Swimming at night? My God, this was a different sort of universe. We bugged our Dad to let us go swimming and he did, probably because he’d been on his own for a couple months and had forgotten how many unruly children he had spawned and wanted to get rid of a few of them. The pool felt great after a day spent on planes and in airports.

The next day, we drove to our new home in Volusia County. Every bridge we crossed had at least one person fishing on it. It was a workday in the middle of the week and everyone seemed to be fishing. We breezed into town, crossed the Intercoastal Waterway, drove through a tunnel under a big hotel and right onto the beach. I had seen the Pacific during our vacation trip to the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 (we lived in Washington State then) but I had never actually been in an ocean. And so many girls in bikinis.

The next day, we all went to the beach. The water was kind of rough but being in the ocean was so cool. Mom made us wear shirts when not in the water to cover skin vulnerable to the sun like any other Irish-American kids who’d spent their youth in snow country. Mom came in the water with us but Dad watched from the beach because he never learned how to swim. Hurricane Cleo was coming up the coast and passed through Daytona the next day, stirring up the surf on its way to St. Augustine. It dumped plenty of rain, more than I’d ever seen in one storm.

Next: Trial by hurricane