September brought Wally and Wes both in school, the start of a job redoing a two-flat that is going to be much larger than I originally thought and Dennis gone to his new job for two weeks at a time. I do have to admit that Dennis only being able to come home every other weekend was nice since the only turmoil was in short phone calls everyday. He was not doing well looking for houses, not happy with much of anything on the East coast and definitely not happy being away from home.
Somehow I finally managed to tell Barney that we were moving. I will never forget the look on his face or the length of time it took him to say something. We were having lunch at our favorite place and I just blurted it out. When he finally spoke he asked if I was really going to go. How could I answer that? I finally came up with not really wanting to go but what else could I do. He said he needed to think about this and we would talk about it later because there was no way he wanted to lose me again. That was a good thing as I did not want to cry in the restaurant.
Ford had this very interesting deal for looking for a new home when an employee was transferred. I got to fly to Philadelphia, stay for three days, find a house and fly home with all expenses paid. Sounds easy and like a little vacation, right? Wrong! This was a nightmare due to the fact that Dennis was looking for the perfect junior executive home in a housing market almost triple what it was in Kansas City. New construction to replace the Kansas house that we paid $75,000 for was in the neighborhood of $250,000 in New Jersey. Remember this is a "have to move" with no salary increase.
I do have to admit that my first reaction to Philadelphia was this was the place that American Bandstand started and Rocky ran up the steps of the Art Museum. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I should have paid more attention to American history but one of the first people who spoke to me in the airport sounded like he was speaking a foreign language. I really could not understand what he was saying and I wanted to get back on the plane.
Dennis picked me up and had the real estate lady waiting for us to start looking at houses. The language some people spoke in New Jersey was easier to understand but I did take an instant dislike to the real estate lady. I could never get her name straight so I just called her Mona since she seemed to moan a lot when I refused to go look at houses Dennis had picked out because they were all unaffordable. After two days of looking at houses that were perhaps in our price range with holes in the walls like someone had hit it with their fist, lots of purple paint, questionable neighborhoods and an Archie Bunker on every corner it was pretty easy for me to burst into tears every time Mona tried to talk me into a nightmare house. It was easy for me to act like a mental case since she was quickly driving me crazy.
After two days of Mona dragging me around I happen to pick up a little neighborhood paper. By some sort of luck there was an ad for a house that sounded interesting and in our price range. I called Mona and said I wanted to see this house the next day. Well, that did not make her happy as she said she didn't know anything about the township and was sure it was not suitable. I told her if she didn't want to show it to me I would call the realtor listed in the ad, sniffed a few times and in ten minutes she had made an appointment for the next morning to see the house.
On the way she had nothing good to say about the township the house was in - the old bad schools and no shopping mall routine. The township was actually closer to Dennis's office than the junior executive areas he had been looking at since he did not want a forty mile commute again. When we started approaching Riverton Township I noticed the houses were not new, there were tree lined sidewalks, quaint old buildings with cute little shops in them and a yacht club on the mile wide Delaware River. When we pulled up to the address of the house for sale we had just gotten out of the car when the local police showed up and wanted to know what we were doing. When we told him were there to look at the house all was okay with him as he just kept an eye out for strangers in town.
All I remember looking at the house for the first time was that all it needed was a white picket fence to be perfect. It was a white Dutch colonial with hundred foot trees in the backyard and one block from the river. Dennis was not happy to see the single car garage out back but.. ouch... life isn't perfect. The house had been built in 1915 and the builder lived in it for about fifteen years and then the Adam's family moved in. Mr. and Mrs. Adam's were moving to their winter home in Florida permanently and leaving the house they had lived in for fifty years.
It was love at first sight for me. I had to fly back to Kansas City at noon the next day so we put a bid in on the house that afternoon, they countered, we agreed and signed the papers before I flew home. Dennis was not pleased at all but doing the math it was the best we had found.
The Adam's asked $75,000 for the house and agreed to replace some of the wood shake shingles. Dennis could not have his junior executive house because all of them were way over the budget. The Adam's house had property taxes of $6,000 a year and required a $500 a year flood insurance policy plus this was the interesting time when a home interest rate was 15%. The property taxes on the same priced house in Kansas City were $600 a year, no flood insurance and a 5.5% interest rate. Ouch.....the property taxes alone were going to add $500.00 a month onto the house payment not to mention the higher interest rate and the flood insurance. Moving to the East Coast in 1980 was not looking to be a positive move in a million ways.
On another sad note no one was buying houses in Kansas City. We had put ours on the market for $95,000 with no lookers. The one positive aspect of moving with Ford is that they would buy your house from you if it did not sell by the time you had to close on the new one. That saved the day as the Kansas house did not sell for over a year. The Adams were not leaving for Florida until the end of October, I refused to go live in a motel for more than one night so I had time to finish the decorating jobs I had and try to reconcile myself to the move.
Even though I had found a house I liked in a neighborhood I liked it did not mean that there were not constant thoughts about not moving to New Jersey with Dennis. The old adage that a house does not make a home and the problems in the marriage did not help. I tried to imagine that I could make it on my own with the boys but I was scared I could not support them. Years of being told I was stupid had taken their toll.
It was a good thing I had Gordon and Paula's place to do. It was what is called a two-flat which is a duplex on top of each other rather than side by side. Gordon owned it and lived on the second floor. It was only a few blocks from the Country Club Plaza Shopping Center and was built in the 1920's. Plaster walls, leaded glass windows, original wool carpet and very much in need of not only paint but lots of plaster work, leaded window repairs and all new window coverings. Lots of this was totally out of my realm of expertise so I called a contractor I had met on another job. Learning experiences are good and this one was a doozey.
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