Morning Memories

We made our morning expedition into Monterey starting at about 6:30. First we went to one of our favorite breakfast restaurants, Old Monterey Café. We shared a wonderful serving of huevos rancheros, and then walked back to our first apartment on Van Buren Street, just half a block away from our hotel.

On the way we stopped at Troia’s Market. Before Old Mr. Troia died, new owners bought the store, but they retained his name and his decorative paint job depicting a Portuguese fishing village. Mr. Troia, a Portuguese immigrant, was so kind to us when we were first married. He knew of our tight financial circumstances. I made $288/mo, and our rent was $165/mo. There was not much left over at the end of the pay period. Our 11-year-old Volkswagen needed constant repair. One month the car took almost all we had. The commissary over on Fort Ord had over-ordered green peas and sold them by the case for five cents a can. We went for a period of three weeks when we had nothing to eat but green peas. Nothing. No bread. No eggs. No meat. Just peas.

Our apartment had a refrigerator with a freezer compartment about one cubic foot in size. We could not buy more than one day’s worth of ground beef at a time. Every day Glenda would go over to the market and ask for 1/4 pound of ground beef. Old Mr. Troia would smile, casually measure a very generous portion of ground beef, wrap it up and say, “Quarter pound. Just for you!” I know that often that daily ration of ground beef often exceeded half a pound.

Our old apartment is still there, much as it was when we left it. There have been a few changes. The door is painted blue now. Ours was white. All of the apartments in the area, built in the early 1950s, have been spruced up, renovated, remodeled and remade so that they are commanding monthly rent higher than our house payment.

We came back to the Merritt House and saw attendants serving coffee al fresco in the front yard. Glenda and I sat and enjoyed a cup before I started the next leg of our adventure – a hike up Franklin Street.Read more