Christopher Paul was born in Corvallis, Oregon, on May 30, 1965, only five days after my own thirtieth birthday. Two weeks later the family began a new life which led us in a very different direction.
A month or so earlier, in mid-April, I made my first flight to Washington, D.C. to house-hunt before moving on to the annual biochemistry meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The plane was a Boeing 727, the series which had made its maiden flight only two years earlier, in 1963. It was a strange, exciting experience to ride inside a javelin thrown into the sky. Technology said it should stay there, hurtling across the continent, but common sense said otherwise. Everyone knew, from the days of the Wright brothers, onward, that airplanes had propellers that moved the air rapidly over the wings to provide “lift” to the underside of them. They did not have jet engines mounted there instead. Somehow it worked.
I made my first landing in Washington, D.C., an event repeated often over the next five years. Each time there was the wonderment of seeing the Capital laid out beneath me. The Mall, the White House, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were extremely exciting to view from a seat traveling several hundred feet above them. An early, evening arrival was even better, with the lights shining on each of the buildings erected to give a sense of solidarity to all who beheld them. I had a very early infection resulting in Potomac Fever that lasted for decades.
I was fortunate to find a perfect house only a few blocks from the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. It was of modest Georgian style with old bricks, dormer windows and white trim. Of course, there was a cherry tree in the front yard. We could have it as a very inexpensive, semi-furnished rental for a year, while its owner, who was an officer with the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), was on an out-of-town assignment. The NIH was part of the USPHS, which, itself, was a division within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW). Welcome to the federal alphabet soup!
In mid-June, only a few weeks after Kip (the shortened version of Christopher Paul) was born, Karen and the three kids, Debbie, Ken, and Kip, had their own 727 adventures flying from Corvallis to Cleveland by way of Chicago. This was Karen’s first flight. It was, she maintains, adventurous enough for her. The plane was late arriving in Chicago. Ground assistants helped her with the three young kids, ages six years, two years and three weeks, race from one terminal to another. She has maintained that the businessmen on the flight to Cleveland readily made room for them. A telephone call from an airline agent alerted Karen’s father of the delay, since he was to have met them at the Cleveland airport for the drive to Sandusky where she would await my arrival.
The plan was for me to drive our recently purchased Chevy wagon to Ohio, meet the family, visit relatives, and drive on to Bethesda. The loading of our furniture onto a cross-country moving van would be supervised by our former, semi-willing landlords, the Messengers. Somehow it all worked out. Driving from Oregon to Ohio in a Chevy van was more comfortable than driving a VW van to the Pacific Northwest, as we had done only two years earlier. My escape from the secret kingdom of Tsoo E. King, to the Johnsonian administration made up for any hardships of the lonely drive.
A new world lay ahead of me. The days of academic studies and research would now become a time for learning about science administration. Now I would be supervising the giving of federal grants instead of trying to get them. It seemed as if this direction in my life, as well as in my geography, would be more fun, and maybe more exciting in a positive way.