A Life's Journey : Choice and Circumstance

By Robert Furmaga

The writings in my life's journey are an examination of events with some of the people, places, and experiences I remembered, fitting them together and appreciating how they influenced who I was. So much time, choices--good and bad--mistakes, failures, and achievements.

I had difficulty concentrating and retaining data in school, until I started taking private music lessons my first year in high school. I was learning to study and memorize music, which started to carry over into my high school classes. My life through graduation was disjointed, but I was making progress and retaining minimal data to enter engineering studies. I struggled through college and upon graduation with my BSEE, was on to a fifty-year professional career. My career gave me freedom of choice in engineering and marketing, both domestic and international.

As you follow my path, you will see that I essentially learned to make choices based on data and conditions, void of impulse. Many times, I had no choice, confronted with unanticipated events. But even then, I would stop, analyze, and attempt some acceptable outcome. My decision to study engineering and complete my degree lacked any preparation or plan. I was strapped with financial burdens and changing work conditions, which I did not manage well. On top of this, I needed to live and grow personally with a philosophy for life, continued music studies, art and culture, and social development. Plus there was the added pressures of the selective service to be considered.

If you have the opportunity, before you start a life's goal, make a plan with reasonable milestones, allowing for unforeseen events. If it takes years, allow for your being a human being, and if you require a companion, find one who will share your life in a loose relationship with love and respect, where you both understand it is not forever. No controls. Conflicts are not what you require in life.

If you are lucky and have a memory where you remember almost everything, enjoy it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889828778

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction

The Early Years

Our Home on Julian

WWII

Salvation

On to Sherrill

The Wild Ride

Ruth

The Free Press

Lawrence Technological University

Sam

Time for Another Car

Goodbye, Colette

Army Years

Mending a Life

An Assessment at Twenty-Seven

Career and Midlife

New Orleans (1964)

Huntsville—Getting Started

Greenhills

GE: General Electric's Large Jet Engine Development Group (LJEDG)

General Electric's Large Jet Engine Development Group (LJEDG)

Back to New Orleans (1974)

CAC—Settling In

Mexico, 1980–1982

A Second Round

Global Travels

Zero Visibility

New Orleans Commuter

Petroxyz

Houston Restart

Persons of Interest

Wally

Higher, Bobby, Higher

Hot Rod

Cigarette Money, 1948

A New Home

The Draft

Winter Wonderland

Summer and a New Life

Bid or Get Out

Running Out of Luck

Gerry

No Concessions

The Last Visit

Rosemary

Richard

Bobby

The Snapshot

Linda

Linda—a Biography

The Papers

Jim and Lorrie

DeLinda

Internet, Not Deleted

Linh

Moving On

Family Matters

Two Lives in Contrast

Andrea

Daniel

Piddy: A Very Special and Smart Cat

A Very Special and Smart Cat

The Family

A Gift from Katherine

Young Sylvia

Wife and Mother

The First Encounter

Environment

A Final Note about Walter

Joseph Furmaga—a Short Biography and Notes

Chester (Uncle Chuck)

Time for the Unexplained

Addendum

Reflections

Distillation and Observation

Crossing a Minefield

Personal Change

An Update at Eighty-Six

The Final Chapter

The Value in This Journey

About the Author

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A Life's Journey : Choice and Circumstance

Robert Furmaga

Copyright © 2024 Robert Furmaga

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2024

ISBN 979-8-88982-876-1 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88982-877-8 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

Last year in June, I was visiting a friend in Houston who I had not seen in thirty years. He had stayed with me for a few months in New Orleans, about 1991, when I was working at CPU on a deep water platform in the Gulf of Mexico. He'd had a lengthy career, and here he was, retired and doing consulting work in the oil and gas market. Accomplished, lovely home, charming wife, and an airplane for travel with his business. His wife fixed steaks and salad for a late afternoon lunch, with a good wine and cigars to follow. We were talking about my past experiences, and he suggested I write about my life and travels. Later, I started writing and by December, had finished the first drafts on about fifty episodes, covering eighty-five years from childhood to the present.

For myself, the writing was an examination of my life's journey and some of the people, places, and experiences I remembered, fitting them together and maybe appreciating how they influenced who I was. So much time, choices—good and bad—mistakes, failures, and achievements.

I had an early awareness back in the baby crib, of not wanting to take my afternoon nap. I was crying and jumping up and down until my father, after several warnings to lie down, spanked my behind. Or another time when my father went to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. I could barely reach the faucet on the bathroom sink, turning it full on and not being able to turn it off. Appreciating the impending disaster, I next was racing down Joy Road Avenue without a stitch of clothes to get my father to turn it off.

My memory for past details was always exceptional. About my memory, I recently discovered studies of a specific memory type: autobiographical memory (AM). I have some markers, like fantasizing and daydreaming in my youth, blocking out mental distractions, a compulsive behavior to organize my environment, and the ability to recall episodic life experiences which fill this book. But early on, I was always able to summon detailed images from periods throughout my life.

I had difficulty concentrating and retaining data in school, until I started taking private music lessons on the saxophone in my first year in high school. I was learning to study and memorize music, which started to carry over into my high school classes. My life through graduation was bumpy and disjointed, but I was making progress and retaining minimal data to enter engineering studies. I struggled through college and upon graduation with my BSEE at twenty-seven, was on to a professional career and a gateway into the next fifty years of possibilities—growth, travel, relationships. My career in engineering and later in marketing, both domestic and international, gave me the freedom to travel and vanish for days and weeks. With customers, I moved at all levels of their organization, working with field hands to invitations to corporate business meetings. I touch briefly on some of those experiences, writing short passages.

I met some very decent and quality individuals, customers, business associates, and corporate officers. A few were void of any human value, trampling on anyone in their way, one firing two long-term employees, using their wages to pay for repainting his airplane. So much for CEOs. Through the years, I always respected engineering associates who were technically competent and predictable, without hidden agendas. When I was working in the petroleum industry, the vice president of marketing knew me well and never pushed me to compromise my values. He used others to forward his agenda.

In my professional life, my main concern was to solve problems and create solutions using equipment and systems. Most of the personnel I managed, I knew their technical limits and capabilities, giving them assignments and tasks but keeping a distant eye on their progress to completion. Mentoring is a gift learned.

A slight observation about myself, underlying some of these episodes is the discovery that I was an escapist from childhood to midlife, leaving unpleasant situations and people both mentally and physically when possible.

People keep diaries to record daily events, experiences, and their personal thoughts. I did not keep a diary, but in later years, I chronicled events, including my impressions and thoughts at that time. I have included some of these writings under Addendum. What I find revealing in these accounts is my changing views of religion, God's existence, and my coping with this human experience.

As to the journey…

The Early Years examines the improbable path to my being an engineer, bumping along through childhood into my midtwenties. I was learning about life by observation. I had a good physical environment, but there were always issues, but I was finally there—my BSEE.

Career and Midlife details my life as an engineer, solving problems with all the individuals who taught me more about this life experience than engineering. By my early thirties, I already had all the necessary technical and personal skills to guide me through my journey.

Persons of Interest completes the profiles of all the individuals who significantly influenced and altered my life for better or worse. It explores interrelations with some decent and normal people and touches on others damaged by their early family environment. There is some humor buried in these character studies.

The Family presents the people and experiences that shaped my early home environment and its influence on my siblings.

The addendum includes some of my evolving thoughts, ideas, and views on this life's situations, compiled during my adult years and The Final Chapter.

Note:

Many of the events, people, and business entities described in Part 2: Career and Midlife are from a time forty years ago. Companies have merged into other organizations, and most do not exist anymore. Others are firms using the names from the past with new management personnel. The names used in this book are from that past era. Zero Systems, Petroxyz, CAC, AH, and NOC are pseudonyms

Part 1

The Early Years

Our Home on Julian

My father was painting the front bedroom on Julian with peach-colored linseed oil paint; latex was not available yet. I was about three, standing and watching him about an arm's length from the wall he had just painted. He looked at me reading my mind, as I wanted to touch the paint to see how it felt. Don't touch the wall. He turned back, and I could not resist. I touched the wall with my index finger, peach paint now covering the tip. He put the paintbrush down, spanked me, and wiped the finger with a rag smelling from turpentine. Another time he was painting a home on Stoepel Street, second-floor living room and dining room to make extra money before the war. It was late fall, and I was with him in the evenings just sitting while he painted. I still have a mental picture of the porch across the front of the house with a door and inside stairway on the right, leading to the second floor.

Much earlier, I remember sitting on the floor in our living room playing with a set of colored letter blocks—A, B, C—about 1 1/2 inch square. I had a large top which I could pump up and down to make it spin. The floor was varnished wood, which my dad would partially cover with an area rug later. He already had a dark mohair sofa and chair, table with a lamp by the front window, a floor lamp with a glazed white-and-yellow stone base, trimmed with a metal ring, and a yellow-tan metal shaft to the lamp area covered with a shade. The lamp was set next to the chair for reading the newspaper. Against the wall by the bedroom door was a floor standing radio with a bluish-green light to aid with tuning, glowing when you were on station. The arms of the sofa and chair had white lace doilies which my mother had made. Off to one side was the door to my parents' front bedroom.

There was a large entryway between the living room and the dining room. The dining table was dark walnut, with six chairs, one special with armrests. There was a matching buffet against the side wall with compartments on both sides and drawers in the middle. A wooden china cabinet with a decorative full top door and two hinged doors on the bottom was set diagonally in the corner for the dishes. I would hide sometimes in the buffet side compartments, quiet and unnoticed, listening to conversations in the room.

Between the dining room and kitchen was a swinging door. The kitchen had a linoleum floor with a wooden table and chairs for all the meals, but was used mostly during the day by my mother to prepare chickens, pork chops, roasts, turkeys, vegetables, deserts, cookies, pies, soups, etc. Going through the swinging door, there was a stove on the left with one large oven on the bottom and gas burners on top. Farther to the left against the wall was a sink with a sideboard on both sides. The back of the kitchen had a partial wall covering the stairs down to the back door landing and basement. A brown wooden icebox with several doors was against the partial wall next to the steps. There was a window on the right side of the kitchen with a view of the field next door, usually overgrown with weeds and sunflowers. As kids, we would chew on the seeds. The iceman delivered a twenty-five-pound cake of ice during the week and sometimes a fifty-pound block of ice for the weekend.

In the basement, my mother would wash clothes in two sinks near the basement wall by a small window on the field side. The sink on the right with hot water, a washboard, soap, and a hand wringer. The sink on the left was filled with rinse water. There was a light over the sinks, and later her first washing machine, with an automatic wringer would be in front of the sinks. My mother would carry the washed clothes in a basket up the stairs and hang them on clotheslines in the yard with old-style clothespins, replaced later with spring type. When it rained or the weather was too cold, she would hang the clothes on lines strung in the basement. In springtime, my mother would wash the basement floor with soap, hot water, and a broom. There was a floor drain near the sinks.

The basement walls were cinderblock construction. The floor was concrete with three wooden posts, spaced to support the upper floor. There was a coal furnace and coal bin to the front of the house and a hot water heater in the center of the basement. At that time, the hot water heater did not have an automatic shutdown or safety valve. Someone would have to remember to turn off the gas or the water would get extremely hot. During the winter, when I was cold, I would kneel in front of the heater with the heater door open to stay warm.

My dad would order coal for the winter in September, delivered by a coal truck with a chute through the front basement window. The bin was filled with coal to the ceiling rafters and would last the winter. When the weather got cold, my dad would shovel coal in the furnace and start a fire with newspaper and a match. We would remove the cinders and clinkers daily from the furnace bottom. Once or twice during the winter, my mother would buy navy beans and cook them in a crock with seasoning and brown sugar, placed on a ledge behind the furnace door to cook overnight.

Back upstairs, there was the front bedroom with a small closet off the living room. The bathroom and back bedroom were connected by a small hallway off the dining room. At the back of the bedroom was a doorway leading to the attic stairs. The bathroom had an old-style bathtub with feet, and the toilet and sink were on the opposite side of the room. There was a window for ventilation, which when opened, you could see into the neighbors dining room and bathroom. Joey, a young woman, would bathe and change clothes with Wally and his friends watching in the dark, until Rosemary told Joey.

I would take a Saturday night bath with Lifebuoy soap, which left a dark grayish ring around the tub. When I was small, I would hide behind the tub between the back of the tub and wall, no one suspecting I was there.

After I grew out of the crib, I slept with my sister in a full-size bed in the back bedroom. I fell off the bed one night and rolled under the bed in the dark. I woke up crying for help, my hands clutching the bedsprings. The lights came on, and my dad found me under the bed. Not much later, my father finished the bedroom in the attic with one bed for Wally and another for Gerry and me.

The attic floor had planks laid down for walking to the front bedroom, no insulation. Winters were very cold in the attic, with ice forming on the inside of the windows. Later Dad would add storm windows and a floor register, maybe 6 by 12, for a little heat to rise into the room. This was imaginary as the furnace was not forced air.

Gerry and I took turns wetting the bed, and Dad would call us the fire chiefs. There was a light at the top of the stairs with a long string running along the handrail on the back wall. You could pull the string and turn on the light. I was always afraid of the dark and tried to wait for my brothers to retire.

Wally had a small table, lamp, and chair outside the bedroom on the plank floor. When it was warm, he would build wooden stick model airplanes. Early in the war, he built a four-engine B17 and a German Stuka dive bomber along with others. When he finished the Stuka, he flew it out the back window several times, finally setting it on fire to crash in the ground below.

My mother would get a live duck for Easter, and we kept it for a time in the yard. She killed it and used the blood to make czernina (blood soup). I would