When in Rome…
New York, that is, not the beautiful city in Italy
When you’re a kid in a military family you don’t get a vote about where you’re going to live. At least that’s the way it was when I was growing up in the 1950s. My father was career Air Force and we moved whenever he was transferred, no ifs ands or buts. And definitely no whining or complaining, which would have been pointless anyway.
Sometimes these moves turned out great, like when he was transferred to Wheelus Air Base in Tripoli, Libya, which I wrote about here.
But other times it was not so great. From Libya he was transferred to Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. The culture shock for me, at age 11, of the small ugly town after the exotic city on the Mediterranean was intense.
Back then there was no Google, we never knew anything about where we were going. Even if we’d had an encyclopedia, which we didn’t, there wouldn’t have been an entry for that Rome.
There was a rumor that another family on the Base had been sent there instead of Rome, Italy in a typical military mixup. The story may have…
