In 1973, the project we were working on was ready to be installed in the first (of what was supposed to be many) sites in North Dakota. There were many meetings held at the Morristown office to ask for volunteers to go to North Dakota to do the installation. As I have said before, we really didn’t like New Jersey that much and I was one of the first to volunteer.
We were inticed with all kinds of incentive packages to go. We were given perdiem (which is a set amount of money each day just for the inconvenience of being there). We were given I think it was $1000 just to buy winter clothes. North Dakota goes well below zero in the winter time and people used to New Jersey had to be talked into going. We bought parkas for Karen and I. We may have gotten one for Matt, I don’t remember. David was probably too little for a parka. We bought long-underwear and other clothes that we thought we would need.
One of the coolest things they did was to pay to have our car winterized. And that means more than just making sure the anti-freeze is up to standards. We installed a block heater in the car and an inside header which was independent of the header that the car already had. So the car now had two plugs hanging out from the front of the grill, one to plug in the block heater which kept the engine warm and one to run the inside heater which was really just a small fan that kept the inside of the car warm while it was parked. Of course, neither of these heaters worked when the car was running, they were just for when it was parked. And the cool thing about an inside heater was you never had to clean off the windshield in the winter time.
So, sometime in 1973 (I don’t remember exactly when, probably in the summer), we packed up and once again moved. This time to Cavalier, North Dakota. There was still just four of us. Since IBM was providing the housing for us, we didn’t want to sell our home in New Jersey on the off-chance that we might come back to it. We talked to the Bishop and found this couple who were kind of in need and needed a place to live. So, we arranged to let them stay in the house while we lived in North Dakota. They got to live there rent-free and we got someone to look after the house for us while we gone. And, I think the Bishop agreed to look in on them once in a while to make sure they weren’t trashing the place.
Dad