Rats

A week of highs and lows. First, I discover that my car won't start because rats have built nests in the engine compartment and eaten the wiring. I persuaded that strange, nearly silent electrical engineer Dwight Gray from the Boeing factory to come over to help me fix it. I'd like to drive to Portland to visit my mother - she doesn't sound well on the phone. Our gasoline supplies are due to be cut in half here in Seattle in a week; the merchants say it'll work out to about 25 gallons per driver per month. So if I want to get behind the wheel for any distance it's now or never.


Speaking of rats, it turns out we've got one in human form working right here in Boeing! That suave riveter Grant Wilson was courting my friend Susan Johnson for the last several weeks. My former tormentor Frank Lomax, of all people, got concerned. He took me, Betty and Jane to an old, nondescript apartment building across the street from the plant. Turns out those Lester Apartments used to be an infamous whorehouse! when They were built 30 years ago by a corrupt Seattle police chief, who actually got a percentage of the girls' earnings if you can imagine such a thing! Frank says that's all in the past now, but evidently a couple of "working girls" were still using the place. Who should pop out of their door at lunch but our very own Mr. "I'm named after two presidents" Wilson! Caught red-handed (to put it politely), Grant agreed to break things off with Susan, though evidently he told her some cockamamie story about needing to marry within his church. Some church that is!

I just remembered something Grant said when we first met: Jane asked him why he wasn't in the service. His answer: "Heart trouble." Indeed.


On the happier side, Betty got another letter from her husband Joe in Alaska. He's contending with mud and an unbelievable profusion of mosquitoes. I was jealous at first, but then on Sunday, my first wedding anniversary, I was astonished and thrilled to get a radiotelephone call from Bob, all the way from Australia! He was only able to talk for a few minutes and I could only hear about every other word, but it meant so much to me to hear his voice for the first time in four months.