About Bill from his wife Margaret:
I left school just before I was 17 and worked in a pharmacy (chemist shop) called Owens
and Sons. The secretary there was Mrs. Flora Bell who lived next door to Bill. She
introduced us and we played tennis together. Bill also introduced me to classical music.
We were engaged in 1953. Bill was still at college then. When he got his degree, he
went to work in London and then Beecham's in Brockham. Later he joined ICI and
worked in Merseyside and then in Grangemouth in Scotland.
!955 Bill and Margaret were married at Brunswick Methodist Church in
Newcastle on Tyne. We honeymooned in London at the Strand Palace hotel (total bill
was 13+ pounds) Went to live in Scotland; rented a room in a flat but
had the use of the whole place as Mrs. Gibbs lived with her daughter in
Falkirk. We bought a house in Falkirk right next to the railway station.
Bill rode a motor bike to and from work and then we got a little Austin with a soft top.
The first summer was glorious weatherwise and we drove all over Scotland in it. We had
a flat tire once and had no jack and were out in the wilds. As it happened we were on a
soft shoulder so we dug under the wheel and managed to change it.
He changed his job and we moved to
Picktree, Co. Durham, first living with parents, during which time
I lost a baby at seven months.
We lived in Picktree for a few years during which time John and Peter
were born. After seven years, Bill became chief chemist at McKecknies
in Warrington. And we lived in Barnton and Little Leigh and at that house we built a
greenhouse on the side of the house by ourselves. Bill was paying 33% in taxes at that
time and he applied for a job in Canada and got it. We moved to
Alberta Canada in 1968, flying first to Amsterdam in a prop plane (very bumpy for our
first flight) then by Canadian Pacific. It was relatively empty and the boys were taken up
to the cockpit. It was January and we expected to be knee deep in snow but there was
only a light covering, but bitterly cold. The airport at that time was 17 miles out of the
city but is now totally surrounded by the city. Bill worked there as a bench chemist with
triple the salary. This was a good period for our social life with a good group
of friends and we acquired a dog, Geordie. After six months Bill's father died suddenly.
His mother came shortly after that and stayed for six months. The company went
bankrupt after
moving all of us down to Amherstburg Ont in 1970. Bill wrote all over the States
and Canada for a job and Basic Chemicals in Cleveland was the only place that
responded favorably but we had to wait ten months for a visa, so he took a
job with a firm on Toronto as interim. Finally the papers came through.
He went ahead and found a place and I drove down with the kids and dog in January
1972, stopping overnight in Erie PA.
The place in Middleburg Heights Ohio was rented by Joanne Shoberg who
became a very good friend. I went to work at Cleveland Trust bank, being there 8 years.
We bought a house in Berea in 1975 and lived there till 1982, when the company moved
us to Bettsville, Oh. Bill's Mam came six time in all, sometimes with Bill's cousin
Lottie. We bought a great place in the country with a pond and 3 acres. In the meantime
Peter had moved to Tulsa, OK to go to the Spartan School of Aeronautics and got his
start in the aviation field. John went to College in Cleveland and got his degree. While still there he worked for Nordson in the summers and they gave him a job.
In 1989, Basic was bought over and Bill took early retirement to keep the medical
benefits. I was working for Bank of Ohio and this was a great experience where I made
lasting friends.
We decided to move to Florida, first to Alva, to a mobile home park, where I first tried
synchronized swimming, and then to Little Leigh. One of our neighbors, Margaret, was
pretty much house bound. She had a delicious sense of humor and would yell over
'Margaret get your butt over here'. She had grapefruit trees and we got a lot of them, so
much so that we bought a small freezer just to keep the fruit and it lasted from season to
season. This town had a great senior center and I learned a lot there including crochet,
pine needle and punch needle craft. We spent the first three summers back in Ohio where
Bill worked as a consultant and I worked in the bank. After that we spent the summers in
Murphy NC where I learned to wood carve.
After 9 years, Peter and Valerie, who were living together, and John, came to Florida for
Christmas. We were staying in a motel that catered for windsurfers, a quaint little place,
and it was then that we were told that Valerie was pregnant. We were overjoyed as we
had not expected to become grandparents. Pete and Val were married in Maui on
February 14th 1997. When Ben was born we went out to visit for three weeks and we
decided to move to California to be near them. We moved into Leisure World in 1998,
moving twice and then Peter and Valerie were moved to Arizona and we followed them.
We stayed two years but couldn't tolerate the heat and returned to what became Laguna
Woods Village in 2004. At that time, Bill was diagnosed with
Alzheimer's disease. In November 2008, after the family had all got together in Vonna's
house in Newport Beach (Joan, Kathryn, David, John and Bic, Pete and family, my
brother, Malcolm and Judith, he was diagnosed with Leukemia
and died in April 2008. We were able to go to England to see him before he died. At
that time we also saw David and Sue's new house and where Kathryn was living at
Boulmer on the North Sea. Kathryn has since bought a house on the same street in
Boulmer.
2009, Bill is slowly losing his memory, but we are doing everything we can to help slow
it down.
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