Moving on - this time to Chamblee, GA

In September, 1957, we left Kansas and moved into married student housing in Chamblee, GA, just north of Atlanta, so that Jim could go to college at Southern Technical Institute. This photo is of the temporary Navy barracks that was used for the college. Our apartments were about a mile away and looked just like the school buildings. We lived downstairs at 200-F Tech Lawson Apartments. The apartments were very small; kitchen, living room and 2 bedrooms and bath. They were so cold in the winter that our plumbing would freeze. They were also not air conditioned and very hot in the summer. Jim went to school full time and worked in the evenings downtown Atlanta at a bank, and still managed to make good grades. He had to go to Georgia Tech on week-ends to study at the library there. Nobody had computers back then. I worked at the Communicable Disease Center, located next to the school in the old Navy buildings also. We spent two years at this location. Our youngest son Bill was born in July 1958. I stayed home for a month and then went back to work and had a baby sitter who came and stayed with the boys every day while I worked. There were a lot of married students and when they graduated the wives got to go on stage and get a Ph.T. degree (Putting Hubby Through). Our rent, which included utilities, was about $20 a month. My parents would drive from Elba, AL to Atlanta several times while we lived there and bring us food from their freezer. We didn't have much money but we were living among other couples in the same boat so we all were happy and working toward a common goal - to get a degree and get a good job.

Jim graduated in June 1959 and in July 1959 we rented a 3 bedroom house about 2 miles away in a nice neighborhood in Chamblee at 1022 Georgian Terrace. I remember thinking that we were "going up" in the world when we moved to a house. Jim got a job as a Safety Engineer for an insurance company in Atlanta and I kept working. By this time we had 3 boys, under the age of 5. We had fun buying some furniture to furnish the house.

What I remember about this house was the big yard and we had to buy a used lawnmower to keep the grass cut. Our next door neighbor had about 7 or 8 beagle hound dogs and we never heard them except when they howled at night. No wonder people moved in and out of this place! We lived here until the fall of 1960 when we bought our first house and moved to Atlanta, near Emory University and the new Communicable Disease Center where I worked.

A few years ago we were in Chamblee visiting my nephew and we tried to find Tech Lawson Apts. They were torn down and a nice park is located there. Then we went to Georgian Terrace and the small homes have been "recycled" and younger families were buying them and the neighborhood was very nice. DeKalb County airport is now located on the site of the old school campus, which was moved to Marietta in the early 1960s and is now Southern Technical University.

Side note: When we moved to Chamblee, there were no expressways anywhere in the Atlanta metro area. They opened a short segment called Northeast Expressway around 1960 and the next year a big shopping center was built called Lenox Square. It probably had as many as 10 stores, including Rich's Dept. Store. Today that center, located in Buckhead, covers many, many acres and has many, many stores on 3 levels.