Kineño Remembers: From the King Ranch to the White House

7. Moving to Concord

C H A P T E R 7 3 Moving to Concord Peggy and I had ten children, five boys and five girls and only ten years between the oldest and the youngest.Eight of the children were born in Richmond. They were Lauro Fred III, Sarita Maria, Ricardo Esteban, Alicia Maria, Victoria Maria, Roberto Sebastian, Rachel Maria, and Veronica Maria. Tomas Martin and Daniel Nicolas were born in Concord , Massachusetts. Whenever I am asked why so many, I tell them it was because we wanted ten. I usually do not tell them Peggy and I had agreed on ten children when I proposed by the campanile at Iowa State. We were able to accommodate Laurie, Sarita, and Rick, our first three children, in the little house on Park Lane in Richmond, but when Peggy became pregnant with our fourth child,Alicia (Lisa),we decided we needed to find a larger home. We bought a three-bedroom house in HenricoCounty,paying$18,500forit.Theatticwasleftunfinished,and eventually I built a bedroom there for Peggy and me. The basement opened at ground level and was also unfinished. I converted this basement into a playroom for the children and completed the unfinished bathroom. It was a tri-level home and quite modest, but Peggy and I considered it a palace. We faced all of the trials of families with young children, and there were never enough hours in the day. Those were truly busy times. We were thankful all of our children were healthy, and other than the usual childhood illnesses they were well most of the time. We did have a les- son in communicable disease, however. Laurie, the oldest, came home from school one day and was not his usual frisky self.Peggy said she was concernedabouthim.Sheaskedmetocheckhim,andIsawspotsonhis belly and thigh. I told Peggy I believed he had chicken pox and by now the rest of our children had been exposed. In fourteen days, we had seven more cases of chicken pox. Obviously we were very busy looking after so many sick children. Some had more severe cases than others, but they all soon recovered . Our pediatrician offered advice, but there was not much we could do except keep the children comfortable. Later, he told us we had driven the communicable disease statistics off the chart and created a major epidemic of chicken pox in Henrico County,Virginia—all in one family! Our ten years in Richmond were happy ones. Our focus was on our eight children. Often on weekends we drove to Williamsburg or Jamestown. Peggy packed our lunch, and we would have a picnic on the way. It was a delightful time in our marriage. Seeing the children grow and start their education was rewarding. One day, as Peggy and I were talking, I said we had the best situation in Richmond that a young couple with a large family could want.We had a comfortable home,and my work at MCV was on the upswing. One day Peggy remarked we had all good things going for us. We were busy and working hard, and Richmond was a great place to live and to raise children. She asked if I had been thinking about moving to another medical school,because she knew sometimes one’s career could be advanced with the right move. I told Peggy I hadn’t been thinking about a move and that I believed it would take a major offer from another medical school to persuade me to leave Richmond. My academic career was advancing rapidly; I was doing well at MCV and I liked the faculty in the anatomy department. Although I had a considerable teaching load, my research program was flourishing and my grant funding had increased. Every year I had published several research papers, and I had a number of graduate students working with me. Moving to Concord 141 Momentous happenings and their dates on the calendar are often fixed in one’s mind, and we can describe exactly what we were doing or where we were when we heard the news. For example, I clearly remember where I was on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed.Also,April 12, 1945, stands out in my mind. I was a young soldier at an Infantry ReplacementTraining Center in Camp Hood,Texas. We had just come in from an exhausting march,and our tough first...