Woodys

Robert and A-young Woody have been our friends since our days at the University of Illinois. He was an Assistant Professor there when I was a graduate student in Chemistry. I was assigned to grade some Physical Chemistry exams for him when he was the undergraduate P-Chem Instructor. It was a very large class, as I remember, and the exams were quite difficult. A-young came from Korea and we got to know each other. At that time there were very few Caucasian and Asian mixed marriages so our friendship flowed together very naturally!

In early 1970, they came to visit us in Kentucky. Their son, Mike,  was a bit older than Pan-pan. They got along very well and we had a wonderful time together.

Fernald Get-together

In less than half a year, Janice’s brother Greg and his wife Judy got together with us twice, once in Lexington and later in Champaign-Urbana, when they moved there. It is very obvious to see the changes in Pan-pan as she grew up during this period. In the two pictures below, please notice the difference between a baby and a little girl, in addition to the background of the pictures.

Pan-pan’s First Christmas

Pan-pan certainly understood quickly what Christmas means to kids. She was absolutely excited about her first Christmas. It was later that we learned she was even more excited about Halloween, when she was able to experience other different holidays. On her first Christmas she had a lot to learn, but she was definitely old enough to feel the excitement! We decorated a tree with many things, all new to her. Then we had visitors and, oh, all the gifts under the tree! We started to celebrate our Christmas holidays at home that year. Nana and Grandpa traveled to our apartment to celebrate with us. How exciting! We have a lot of pictures to help us remember the occasion! Not only did we have pictures with relatives we also had some with our upstairs neighbors. Deanna, Dean and Maria were there too!

Excitement Continued

The excitement we felt in having our first baby continued after we came back from Taiwan. It seemed that every day Pan-pan gave us something new to talk about and opportunities to take some pictures. There were always new places for her to go, new actions different from the day before. Janice had things to report daily when I came home from office. The following pictures might not convey much of our feelings to you, but we had great excitement in taking them at the time.

God Parents

Ginger and Bill Francis had been our close friends during almost the whole time we were in Urbana. Even though they were older than we were, they came to Illinois so that Bill could get an advanced degree after he retired from the US Navy. They had children our age. They were involved in reviving the Illini Folk Dance Society before we got there. We became very close friends. They were one set of God Parents when Margaret was baptized. (Dean and Maria were the other set.) Bill took a job with the Ohio Wild-life Reserve in late 1968 and they moved to Sandusky, Ohio, in 1969. Ginger came to stay with us for more than a week when Margaret was born, to help Janice to take care of the new baby. After we came back from Taiwan, we wanted to show them how she had grown so we went to Sandusky for a short visit. We no longer remember the details of that trip, but we do have some pictures to prove that we were there!

Visitors in the Fall of 1969

The combination of our moving into a new town, our returning from a home-bound trip to Taiwan, my new job, and Pan-pan growing up fast in our small family, brought a great number of our friends to visit our new home in Lexington, KY. The Lowrey family came from Urbana, IL, and Ginger and Bill from Sandusky, OH. They arrived together for a short stay. Then Janice’s Brown University schoolmate Elaine came with her friend. Our Illinois friends Larry and Adriane came. We had a great time. Later Liz came from Indiana. Did I miss some? (most likely!)

340 Grosvenor Street, Lexington, Kentucky

We had round trip tickets from Urbana to Taiwan. After stopping at Dean and Maria’s place in Urbana, we officially moved into our new apartment at 340 Grosvenor Street, which was located quite close to the Chemistry and Physics building on the University of Kentucky campus. We  lived there only one year. It was a duplex, with the second apartment upstairs. We had the whole downstairs with two bedrooms. Dean and Maria helped us to move some stuff in, including the brick bookcase I had made in Illinois. We have carried this bookcase to every place we have lived since it was made. It became one of the constants in our life. Some bricks are in the picture below, before the bookcase was assembled.

Let’s go to Daddy’s Office!

As Pan-Pan grew bigger, we talked with her as much as we could. I remember Janice tried to treat Pan-pan as if she was already grown up by talking to her as if she could already understand what we were talking about when she was only six months old. Of course, “ Let’s go to Daddy’s office” was an important event to be carried out.

First we went to the outside of the “Chemistry and Physics” Building and took some pictures

.

Then we went to Daddy’s office. Look, I am such a big girl now!

My First Teaching Job

You may have forgotten that I had an industrial research job after I got my masters degree, and I had a very good experience. Even though I was later interested in a teaching position, the job market was not very favorable for teaching positions when I was finishing my PhD degree. Therefore, I was looking for industrial jobs as well as teaching positions, just in case a teaching position was not available. In the end, I accepted two invitations each, industrial and teaching, for interviews. The industrial positions were both in the north, one in Chicago one in Racine, WS. I enjoyed both interviews. Since Janice was pregnant, she only went with me to one of those interviews even though she was invited by the industrial companies. Two academic institutions also invited me for interviews in which Janice was not invited to participate. That was the difference between industrial and academic interviews. The interview at Cleveland State University was very interesting. The chair person who invited me even made an appointment for me to meet with the Cleveland Symphony chorus director, as he had heard that I was interested in chorale singing. The second interview was with the University of Kentucky, which provided a very good schedule - not only for them to evaluate me and my academic background but for me to have the opportunity to see them as well. It turned out that it was an easy decision to us to make. Kentucky was more organized and more academic. Janice had told me earlier that she would not like to go to the deep south. Kentucky was as far south as she could stand! It is very nice to report to you that both sides were happy and I made a decision for my first teaching job!

We stopped in Los Angels too

When you try to remember something that happened forty some years ago, your memory can trick you about the details. I do remember that we stopped in Los Angels to see Yang Lin-fong and Debbie (Yuan De-bie), as they were living in Pasadena then. However, I am not sure of the other details during that stop. All the pictures in my collection from that time are in slides and they are in bunches of 36 slides dated as a group.  It is very easy to see that the slides in the same bunch were taken close to the same time, but they are not clearly identified. We flew back from Taiwan, stopped in Los Angeles, and took some pictures with our old friends, Hellene and Knut, from Illinois. It is clear that we did stop in LA after the Taiwan trip, and the other couple with the boy in the picture could very well be also from Illinois. We just do not remember who they exactly are!

Fly-back!

It did not matter how many pictures we took, there was always one more picture needed to be taken with my mother, especially together with Janice:

On August 10th, 1969. We finally boarded a Northwest flight back to the USA. At that time, we had to stop for refueling at Hawaii, and then Los Angeles and Chicago, before flying back to Urbana. As you can see, this fly-back was indeed quite a process. On the Northwest flight, we had a special place for Panpan. It was at the cost for 1/10 of a regular seat, to get this baby set-up in the front of our regular seats.
Since the stop at Hawaii was more than six hours, we hired a taxi to take us to a few places on the Island and to see the city of Oahu. It was truly a very pleasant stop-over.