So I started writing to Esther and we arranged to meet in Los Angeles where she had a girl friend. As I learned later, the girl friend had another man in mind for Esther, but Esther and I got along well together and eventually decided to get married. As told in the Foreword, my announcement came as more than a little surprise to my associates at the Lab. We arranged to be married in Seattle on November 19, 1944.
My family was very positive about my move towards settling down and took the opportunity to treat the two of us while we were in Los Angeles. Uncle Sam loaned me a car (I didn't own my own car until we moved to Dayton in 1946). Brother Jerry took us to the Florentine Gardens and Aunt Molly (mother's sister) and family took us to Cantor's for a typical Jewish dinner. The latter led to a problem for Esther: her people are Sephardic and she had never had gefilte fish or chopped liver and she had trouble downing both. She surreptitiously passed some of hers to me only to have our host insist that she have more!
In Dayton (1946) we were staying with a Mr. Zehring until we could get into the house I had bought. He spent the whole of one night making gefilte fish and the house smelled of it. The next day he insisted that Esther taste it. When she told him she couldn't because she hated gefilte fish he pointed to the sink and said she had his permission to spit it out if she found it distasteful, so she finally tried it -- she loved it! It was nothing like what we had at Cantor's.
Esther's life had one parallel to mine; our parents were both born in Europe, hers in Turkey, mine in Rumania. Her Pop had been a candy maker there and, since Turkey was very cosmopolitan, he had learned several languages, but not English. The family was very orthodox.
When they arrived in the United States in 1905 they had settled in a small enclave in Seattle where life went on almost as if they were still in Turkey. The language used at home was Sephardic, a Spanish jargon, so that was all Esther knew when she started school. On graduation from high school she was first employed at a hardware store. The fishermen who came into the store liked her and would tell her that there was coffee and sweets across the street for her, the beginning of her love for strong coffee (in recent years heart flutter led to a change to weak coffee). She took a mechanical engineering class at this time. Some time after WW II started a man came into the store and suggested that she visit him at Boeing, which she did. She became one of the first women hired there and was manager of the women in the drafting group when Dawn knew her.
Esther's father had several jobs at different times including selling tobacco and produce at the public market. But the families were inclined to speculate and he had borrowed to buy an apartment with a house next door that they moved into.
We were married in an orthodox ceremony -- the first couple to be married by their new rabbi (now retired, but he points out that we were his first when we visit the synagogue). For our honeymoon we drove down the coast to San Diego in a car that a friend from Seattle had left because he hadn't been able to get the gasoline for the drive to San Diego (it was easier in 1944).
In San Diego, we initially stayed at the home where I had been, but soon found a duplex a short distance from the water in Ocean Beach. The house was small and we were very close to the neighbors in back -- so close that we probably would not have had to raise our voices very much to carry on a conversation between the bathrooms. Esther isn't bashful and was soon on good terms with the neighbor.
Esther's knowledge of Sephardic led to some interesting, and sometimes embarrassing, experiences. In San Diego she would occasionally ride the buses and couldn't help listening as nearby Mexican youths chattered about their love lives, oblivious to the possibility that anyone else might understand them.
In 1952 I gave a talk in El Paso, Texas on my Ph.D. dissertation work and we went across the border to Juarez in Mexico. Our older son, Irving, wanted a serape, so Esther started bargaining with the shopkeeper. While this was going on, the shopkeeper was also talking with an associate, in Mexican, about how much profit they would be making and about the probability that our youngest son, Bob, was adopted as he was so much darker than the other two. Her understanding of the conversation allowed her to make a very good buy. When we left, she astounded them by saying in Sephardic, which they understood, that Bob, like the others, was our son.
In 1964 I gave a talk in Lisbon, Portugal on my automatic mapping system. While walking there Esther had trouble with a heel on her shoe, so we sought a shoemaker. With her Sephardic she managed to converse with him and he was so delighted that he didn't want to take any money for repairing the shoe!
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