During the summer while living in the cabin at Pleasant Point, we had spent some time looking for a house to rent in town. Toward the end of July we found a large house for rent in a nice area on Fifth Street, a short distance to the town’s shopping area and close to their park. About two blocks away at the end of the street, there was a clear view looking out on Lake Ontario. At one time the house had been used as a fraternity house for students attending State University of N.Y. at Oswego which was located at the edge of town.

I took Margeet and the kids back to our home on Hill Street and arranged for our movers through my company. I returned to Oswego, riding back with one of my field engineers who came back to the Pittsburgh area on weekends. Margeet stayed behind to take care of getting things ready to move. In the evenings, I started painting the walls of the sun porch, living room, dining room and kitchen at our new house.

About two weeks later after the movers had finished packing, Margeet drove up with the kids to the cabin, with the movers arriving several days later. Our new home was spacious, with 12’ ceilings and a double-doored storm entranceway. In the large living room which had a fireplace , we placed both our living room and den furniture, with the two couches back to back, and allowing for a walking space between. Like the living room, which ran the full width of the house, there was a sun porch adjacent to it along the street side.

The downstairs also had a dining room, kitchen, a small bathroom without a shower, and a room in the corner which Margeet used for her sewing room. Upstairs was another large room with a fireplace which we turned into a playroom for the kids. Around it were three bedrooms and two full baths. There was a finished third floor which we used for storage of our moving boxes and barrels.

There was a small garage underneath the kitchen area which we never used, even in winter, because there was a steep driveway and little turning room. The basement was circa 1900, unfinished, dusty, a low head clearance and a myriad of pipes running along the ceiling.

We moved in and got settled, but most weekends when the weather was pleasant, we would spend them at the cabin. We did this until the fall and cold weather set in, when we pulled our boat well up on shore for the winter. Even during the first winter, we took several rides there to view the large ice blocks along the shore.

We soon became good friends with our next door neighbors, Bob and Marie Sykes, who had settled there when he retired from the Army Air Forces. Later their daughter, Barbara, who babysat our kids, renamed our Barbara Joan from the Bobbie Joe nickname we used to BJ and it has stuck to this day.

Bob Sykes had served as a meterologist in the armed forces was now a professor at the college. There he was studying the “lake effect” snowstorms which hit this area and also the Buffalo area at the other end of Lake Ontario. At that time there was little understanding of the dynamics which created the heavy snow belts in these areas while the intermediate areas had a normal amount of snowfall each winter.

We had taken our cat, Calico, with us to Oswego, but after a month he disappeared. One day, looking out of our kitchen window in the back of the house, we saw him on a low roof of the house lovated in back of us. We saw the window open and he went inside. We later found out there was an older women living alone there and she must have adopted him. We felt that she needed his company more than we did, and we never pursued it any further.