We lived for a couple of years in Otterbein, Indiana, so for purposes of documenting life story, we stopped and took a few pictures.

The church is across the street from the grade school on the corner of Church and Oxford street. The building and surrounding area has not changed at all.

Our oldest son Jim walked from home to first grade in this school. It looks pretty much the same!

I hadn’t remembered the school’s mascot … the “Red Devils”. I think this is an appropriate name for grade-school-aged children! Jim attended the first grade at this school. We moved to Mentor On the Lake, Ohio where he attended second grade.

The house we owned way back then is on the right and the field across the street from the house is on the left. A new church has been built in that field. During the couple of years we lived there, crops in the field alternated between corn and soy beans.

We bought the house because house payments were cheaper than paying rent, we could buy for nothing down on a VA loan, and we could get a few extra dollars each month while going to school to help pay the mortgage. We bought the house for $12,000 and sold it for $12,000 a couple of years later when we were transferred to Cleveland, Ohio. All in all, we saved a little bit and learned a lot about owning a house!

The house has since gotten new aluminum siding and looks quite a bit better than when we owned it! In addition, there used to be a window on this side of the house upstairs. A bat flew in the open window one night. Getting the bat out of the house was a memorable event!

The lot was 1/3 acre and the first couple of times mowing the lawn with a manual push mower convinced us to buy a power mower. We had a nice garden along with some excellent tomatoes. The city was building a municipal sewer system, but that hadn’t reached our part of town. The septic system was under the grass to the south side of the house. The septic system had lots of problems and needed pumping out about every six months.

Another significant change to the house was replacing the screened-in porch with a new porch. We used to enjoy sitting in on the porch watching the thunderstorms that occurred regularly during July and August. Some of the lightning shows were very spectacular.

We moved to West Lafayette, Indiana after getting out of the Air Force in the fall of 1968. I was attending Purdue University. We arrived just as the school year was starting and apartments were difficult to find. We ended up with a six-month lease in an apartment in this apartment complex. The Church was within walking distance (the building has since been sold and a new building erected). Purdue, however, was quite a distance away so Nina usually drove me to school. I was working midnights at Purdue National Bank, going to school in the mornings, and trying to get some sleep in the evenings. The whole combination didn’t work very well.

We then rented an apartment on Wood Street in West Lafayette. It was within walking distance of Purdue so the transportation issues became much easier. The house has been torn down as Purdue expanded into that neighborhood. From Wood Street we bought a house in Otterbein, Indiana.

The Indiana Veterans Home was a short distance from our first apartment in West Lafayette, Indiana. Nina’s father George spent the last couple of years of his life in the veterans home. He had been an officer in the Navy during World War II. He had moved to Indiana while we were living in Otterbein, met a delightful woman, married her, and spent the rest of his life in Lafayette / West Lafayette, Indiana.