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Paul Smith Family History

Dad went into the Navy in 1943 and was deployed to San Diego. George Alfred Smith was glad to see his two sons go into the military. Paul in the Navy and and Bob in the Army. George was very patriotic.
Wanda drove north up near San Francisco ,California with her baby, Karen to meet Paul where he was stationed. She warmed the baby bottles on the radiator, and she had to stop frequently to change those wet diapers. She had to find a place to stay, and she saw an ad in the paper asking for a “housekeeper”. She went to the home of Colonel May and his wife and was hired. The people were mainly interested in the ration cards of Wanda and the baby. Meat was rationed and the cards helped. Wanda and the baby lived in an apartment over the garage. Paul could visit from the base. Her job was to do the dishes and clean the bathroom and vacuum. They were very nice people. Colonel May paid for Wanda and Paul to play a round of golf with him at the Pebble Beach course...very exclusive. They never were able to play there again because it was too expensive. They were at Del Mar for about 3 month and then they left for Corpus Cristi, Texas.
One of the first things Paul had to do when he enlisted was jump off the back of a huge naval vessel and he said that was the most terrifying thing he had ever done in his life, and he didn't know how to swim. After about 6 months he went into Radar school. The training was to take about a year and a half.
In Corpus Cristi a friend of theirs found Paul and Wanda a place to rent. The friend was a commissioned officer in the Navy. His name was Boyd Harman,and his wife was Phyllis. They were friends of Wanda and Paul in Wilshire Ward. The house was made of wood and was build upon stilts.
A hurricane rose and Wanda and the baby went next door to the brick house of the owner of the wood house and knocked on the door to see if they would let her stay there during the storm. The family was Catholic and she and her husband had candles all over the living room to say prayers for protection from the elements. Paul stayed behind in the wood house with another navy friend. After about 4 or 5 hours, there was a banging on the door. It was Paul and his friend. Paul had drilled holes in the floor to let the water out but it was a hopeless battle. They were welcomed in.
The next day, even though everything was flooded and a lot of trees were down there wasn't that much damage, but it was a scary experience.
Wanda borrowed the lady's treadle sewing machine to sew some clothes for Karen. The machine did not work correctly. Paul's first repair job was fixing this machine.

One thing that Paul and Wanda hadn't been warned about was the prevalence of scorpions in the area. Wanda had brought her daughter's cloth diapers off the clothesline and thrown them on the bed for folding. Unbeknownst to her, there was a scorpion in the diapers which crawled under the blankets on the bed. Suddenly Wanda exclaimed, “OH! There's a needle in the bed!” Paul threw back the covers and found a scorpion which had stung Wanda in the thigh. He killed the intruder...one of three that stung Wanda during her stay in Texas.
To protect baby Karen they put the legs of her crib in mason jars.
Wanda made herself a red and white striped sundress. She hung the dress up on a hanger against the wall. She put on the dress which buttoned up the front. Karen says, “Mommy, Mommy! Ooh bug!'
Luckily Paul was home. He whacked a scorpion off Wanda's back with his hand.

Wanda's bedroom also had other insect problems. The bathroom was a short way from the bed, and there was a hole under the bathroom basin for the drain pipe to exit the house. Wanda had two bedroom slippers beside their bed. Wanda got up in the night to put her slippers on,and feed Karen and she looked down. It looked like half a carton of salt had been dumped between the slippers. Wanda had put her feet in her slippers and lo and behold ants were crawling everywhere. There were 6 columns of ants rapidly carrying their colony's eggs and depositing them in a pyramid between Wanda's slippers. Yuck!
Wanda's sojourn in Corpus Cristi was about 9 months.

Paul was released from the Navy shortly after the defeat of the Japanese in September of 1945. He and Wanda and baby Karen rented a car and drove home to California. He had an honorable discharge.
Paul went back to Douglas Aircraft to work the swing shift and he continued his education in Engineering at UCLA.

Housing was hard to find, so grandma and grandpa Tew demolished an old garage and uncle Bob designed an apartment over the new garage which also had a small workroom for Paul's TV and radio repair business. Paul often commented that as a home teacher people would just ask him to “look” at their broken equipment. Paul would get his vacuum tubes from Figarts, a local electronics supply shop. He had a tool box full of all kinds of interesting shapes of tubes. Karen loved to look at these things in his shop, and also try to figure out the wave forms on his oscilloscope.

The family attended Wilshire Ward in Los Angeles until their move to the San Fernando Valley in 1950.

The above account is taken from an interview with Wanda Smith, wife of Paul Alfred Smith and transcribed by Karen Baxter