Sooner or later every young couple has to realize that their economic honeymoon must end. Our realization came about six months after we were married; it arrived in January of 1959. We recognized we were going broke, or at least, rapidly heading in that direction. We considered our options.
I held a teaching assistantship which paid me a token amount for instructing students in their biochemistry laboratory classes. Karen earned a pittance as a secretary at The Straight. Having examined our budget, we considered moving to a less expensive apartment. Our current rental on West Shore Drive was a very extravagant $100 per month.
We even discussed the possibility of my taking a leave-of-absence for a year so that we could both move back to Ohio and get full-time teaching positions as we had once prepared to do. I was positive I would return a year later and continue seeking a Ph.D., although we knew of situations where the time-to-return to graduate school never arrived.
We thought we needed a more immediate solution, pending any major decisions about my career alternatives. We had to move, preferably into town; the 5.6-mile commute to the campus was becoming a real hardship, especially with the oncoming return of a typical Ithaca winter of ice, snow and slush. Given the low temperatures, I was never positive Fritz would turn over each morning and whether I would be forced to get to the lab on foot.
Classes resumed as did our routine, to which we now added searches in the town and collegiate newspapers of ads for rentals. We thought we might have found one for an apartment near the campus, until we discovered the cost to be $105 per month; this would be a 3 percent jump from the frying pan into the fire. Then we answered an ad for a basement rental on Floral Avenue at a cost of $15 per week, a savings of $400 per year in our current budget.
The rooms were small (as usual). They included a separate bedroom, living room and kitchen. The bathroom was located in a different part of the basement so that, in order to use the facility, we would need to pass through the landlord’s space where he had a pool-table. We also acknowledged the house, owned by a local cab driver, was on the Inlet into the Lake and in the middle of what amounted to be the slum area of Ithaca. There were three other student couples residing in the same house. We decided to take it. Karen became an expert in shooting pool.
We lived in that house for the remainder of our life in Ithaca, although, later, we moved into a second-floor apartment. We gave up the shared poolroom for a shared bathroom and a shared hallway connecting our new apartment with that of another couple.
Now that the decision had been made to move into town and to delay any leave-of-absence, we had the opportunity for another financial disagreement. The midterm break was rapidly approaching. Karen wanted to use the time in order to visit her sister, Tami, who was living with her husband, Ken, in Rome, New York. Karen proposed we might also spend a day in nearby Syracuse. I wanted to devote the free time to a catch up for the study-time I had missed during the Christmas holiday. Karen felt this would not be a vacation for her, and we both really needed one. With the move to Floral Avenue coming up, we finally decided we could use this time to settle into our new apartment, as well as save a few dollars.
While we were discussing how we might spend the upcoming break, I had to pay for the first quarter of our hospitalization insurance. That additional expenditure confirmed our need to eliminate our travel to upstate New York. I never did get to visit either Rome or Syracuse while living in Ithaca. Moreover, neither did we get to use the maternity benefits of our hospitalization policy; our daughter, Debbie, was born within the next nine months, days before this part of the insurance became effective.
Instead of travel to either the modern or ancient cities of Rome and Syracuse, we settled on dinner at the Victoria Restaurant and a movie with Ros Russell as “Auntie Mame.” As a result, our personal motto became: “How bleak is our puberty!”