During the summer of i946 we took a trip to Kirksville, Missouri to visit Bruce and his wife Marie. Paul Maxwell, one of the pilots I had flown with in England, lived in Tarre Haute, Indiana and I had his address so we stopped to see him. His wife was home and told me where he worked so I looked him up. It was some kind of a factory or office building and I was walking down a corridor when I saw him ahead of me so I caught up, tapped him on the shoulder and said 'hi'. He was very surprised and we spent the evening with dinner at their home. We stayed in a motel and drove to Missouri the next day. Bruce was just getting settled in and lived in a small older house off the main road. We stayed several days with them, talking, fishing and going on picnics. We arrived there on a Saturday and stayed up half the night talking and drinking. The next morning we awoke with terrific hangovers and Just barely made it through church services. In the afternoon Marie made a container of soup to take to Bruce's grandfather who was 90 years old and had just returned from the hospital after having a leg amputated. He was gone when we got there and we found him down at a pool hall telling all his buddies about the operation. They are tough old birds in that part of the country.
Bruce was a woodworking teacher at the high school and later he moved to Santa Rosa, California to teach there. On weekends he taught woodworking to prisoners at Alcatraz. We had a good time with Bruce and Marie and although we never got together again, we corresponded for years. The big Swede, Al Johnson, owned and operated a motel 'Shady Rest' on a lake in Minnesota and he wrote several times and invited us up for a free vacation, but we never got there.
Back home we looked forward to Lynn's birth and then her childhood years. When Lynn was about two years old we were visiting with our neighbors Ted and Gertrude Smith and several of their friends one evening. Lynn was sitting of the floor and everyone was sitting around her talking. Suddenly Lynn spoke up saying "Daddy looks different than Mommy in the bathtub". The room. was immediately enveloped in a deadly silence and my heart stopped beating. Then Lynn finished saying "Daddy has wrinkles on his belly" and everyone doubled over with laughter. That came close to being my most embarrassing moment.