By: Jerry Blackerby
Sometimes an event happens that is life-changing. Such an event happened on March 20, 1955 that was a life-changing day for me.
I was in the Navy for nearly four years and fully intended to make it a career. I loved the Navy. Dad did not want me to re-enlist, but I intended to re-enlist anyway. About two weeks before my scheduled discharge date, I was unexpectedly sent from my squadron to a receiving center for discharge. I told the Chief that I wanted to re-enlist and return to my squadron. I loved my job in the squadron and the fact that we spent six months in the U.S. And six months overseas each year. I was seeing the world.
When I started to sign the re-enlistment papers, I found out I was scheduled to go aboard an aircraft carrier that was leaving a west coast port in a few days. The Chief told me that the carriers were shorthanded and everyone currently re-enlisting were being assigned to carriers, on both coasts. I said that if I had to go aboard a carrier, send me to the east coast. When the Chief said that his job was to outfit the carriers on the west coast, I took my discharge and went home.
I planned to spend a couple of months at home, travel to the east coast and re-enlist. By shipping out on an east coast carrier, I hoped to see Europe and meet some pretty French, Italian and Spanish women.
I arrived home Sunday afternoon, March 20, 1955. Dad was the pastor of a small rural church in western Oklahoma. That night at church, Mom introduced me to a young lady and her family. She was one of the prettiest girls I had ever met. A week later, we began dating and were together almost everyday after that.
I realized within a few days that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this pretty lady. I was not interested in just a few dates, I wanted to be with her forever. We married just over three months after meeting. I never went back in the Navy.
Not only was Billie a beautiful lady, but she was a wonderful person. She bears a distinction that few people today have. She was born in a tent on her grandparent's farm. Her parents were helping the grandparents and there was no room in the small house, so they lived in a tent in the yard.
Billie was very much like her father, who was one of the finest men I ever met. Her parents were sharecroppers in western Oklahoma. Billie began driving a tractor at a young age and could do anything on the farm that a boy or man would normally do. Her father could repair almost anything mechanical and Billie always helped him.
Although, she could do just about anything on the farm, one task she really hated was chopping cotton. She also did not help cook in the kitchen, another sister helped their mother with the cooking. But, she became a good cook after we married. She taught herself how to sew on her mother's treadle sewing machine. She became an excellent seamstress. She made much of the clothing we wore, including some of my suits.
When we first married, she did not like to go into the grocery store without me. She did not like meeting new people. We took our laundry back home each weekend and she washed our clothes with her mother. They had to draw water from a well and used an old wringer-type Maytag washing machine in the yard. She would not take our laundry to the laundry room at the apartment where we lived.
I was working at Fort Sill as a radar instructor. When RCA lost that contract, I accepted a transfer to Grand Bahama Island as a computer/data handling systems technician tracking missiles. I moved Billie and our two children to an apartment next door to her uncle and aunt in Dallas. Her parents had also moved to Dallas a few months earlier.
I could not stand being away from Billie and found a place for us to live on Grand Bahama Island. It was a one-room camping trailer with a two-room cabana built on located right on the beach, only 100 yards from the high tide mark. We had to live with kerosene lamps, a hand-pump for water and an outhouse. Of course, Billie had lived that way growing up as I had also. She did learn to meet strangers because I was working such odd hours tracking missiles.
I took her home to Oklahoma to have our third child and brought her and the children back a few months later. Before any of the children were old enough for school, I transferred to an uprange job as a technical writer. We moved into Florida near Cape Canaveral.
I began traveling to various downrange sites periodically as a technical writer. I was traveling almost 50-percent of the time. Billie had to learn how to do all of the grocery shopping and take care of everything by herself, which she did very proficiently.
Billie was very athletic. We took up bowling and both of us became coach/instructors in the junior bowling program. We were also active in the scouting programs and Little League baseball. We continued actively working with children in various activities for many years.
We had our fourth child while in Florida. We had three sons and a daughter.
RCA moved us to Goddard Space Flight Center, near Washington, DC. I left RCA after one year on that job. I worked a total of over 12 years for RCA on various contracts around the country.
We then moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area where I took a job with LTV, the airplane manufacturer in Grand Prairie. The moving van burned on the way to Dallas and totaled us out. We had to start all over again. By this time, Billie had adapted and took everything in stride. She began shopping for a place to live and garage sales to outfit our place until the insurance settlement. She had really come a long way from the sharecroppers' daughter I married.
I continued traveling for business quite often while at LTV and Billie had to take care of everything herself. She became a very independent person and could handle almost anything that came up. After 11 years at LTV, I quit and began contracting my services as a technical writer. Billie liked it better when I contracted because she said I did not bring my job home. I contracted most of the time until I retired.
In 1989 Billie had a major heart attack while we were on a trip, which I have chronicled in God Is In Control. We nearly lost her twice that day. Four hours after they put her in Cardiac Care Unit, she flatlined while I was visiting with her. Bells began ringing, the nurses ran me out as they rolled the electric paddles into the room. I went to the waiting room with tears in my eyes. I thought I had just lost her. I was selfish and begged God to not take her from me.
Within minutes, a nurse came to the waiting room calling me by name. She told me that Billie was okay and they had not used the electric paddles. She had recovered on her own. I thanked God. I still thank Him daily for the time I had with her.
Many times after that incident, Billie talked about the attendants say that she was dying. She could hear them, but could not say anything. She said that she was not scared. She was not worried about dying because she knew where she was going