Richard Ballard:
CLASS OF 1952
Madera High SchoolClass of 1952
Madera, CA
Richard's Story
My Story (digest version; I have a detailed version if anyone is interested): One week after graduating Madera High in 1952 I started working as an Auditor-Trainee with the US Army Audit Agency (AAA) in Los Angeles ($3,670 a year). I participated in teams auditing contracts with defense contractors such as Northrop and JPL and other teams doing internal audits of Army installations such as Camp Roberts and Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. I spent two years on active duty in the US Army. Basic training in Ft Ord, then assignments with AAA in the SF Bay Area.
In 1962 I volunteered for 2 to 5 years with AAA in Europe with a Regional Office in Paris and audits all over France and Germany. In November 1963 I met a pretty red-haired French girl named Josie. Got married in a 15th century Roman church in April 1964. We had an apartment in Paris but didnÿt spend much time there as I was traveling to do audits almost continuously. I extended my European tour to 5 years.
In 1965 De Gaulle kicked the US military out of France. Josie and I moved to an Army apartment in Kaiserslautern (K-Town), Germany. Shortly after the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors (1967) Josie and I moved to California. I got an AAA assignment to the San Francisco Regional Office and we bought a house in nearby San Rafael for $25,000. (Wish we still owned it).
After three years of traveling on audits a former AAA colleague I had met in Europe convinced me to go to work for the Federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in San Francisco. That ended my 14 years with AAA. I worked on audits of HEW programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in San Francisco, Federal grants and contracts at Stanford and internal audits of Army depots in Sacramento and Stockton. On the longer assignments I took Josie and our two kids along and rented an apartment. Every couple weekends we drove home to San Rafael to wash clothes and water the lawn.
After a couple of years I got promoted to Audit Supervisor, then Branch Manager and finally Audit Manager. I only traveled 5 or 6 days a month.
Every two or three summers Josie and I took our kids to France to visit Josieÿs parents, one brother and seven sisters. We usually ended up camping on the Mediterranean or Atlantic beaches with one or more members of Josie]s family.
In 1986 I decided Josie deserved to spend more time with her parents and family. I registered with the Army personnel office in Heidelberg, Germany and shortly got a job as Chief of Internal Review of the Headquarters, Berlin Brigade. Josie and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I had a vague idea that West Berlin was on the eastern border of West Germany behind the Berlin Wall. Turns out West Berlin (and East Berlin) was 60 miles inside of Germany, completely surrounded by the Berlin Wall which was 60 miles long. One week after we arrived Islamic terrorists set off a bomb in a GI bar killing a waitress and wounding one soldier who lost a leg. The terrorists were captured a long time later. A week ...Expand for more
or so later the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown occurred, showering nuclear contamination into the atmosphere and dust on us. The Armyÿs THREATCON went to Red and for several weeks an armored personnel carrier followed our daughter's school bus with a manned machine gun on top.
We spent 5 years in Berlin and had a good time. We went to East Berlin often, visiting some nice museums, shopping and eating out, paying with East German Marks (Ostmarks) that we bought very cheaply in West Berlin. We were in East Berlin the night the Wall opened up and were caught in the crush of East Germans exiting Checkpoint Charlie and West Berliners welcoming them with champagne (1989).
After the "Fall of the Wall" the American, Russian, French and British presence in West Berlin started phasing out. I was close to retirement and did not want to hassle looking for a job in America. I had no reemployment rights. I took a job as THE Internal Auditor for the American Hospital in Frankfurt. Four years later I retired.
The Army shipped household goods for Josie and I to Josie's hometown in France, where we were planning on retiring. Household goods for our daughter went to Santa Rosa California, where she wanted to finish her college education. We went with her to Santa Rosa, (temporally) to get her enrolled and to find a place for her to live in. We ended up staying 5 years.
In March 2003 we moved to a 100-year old, three-story house that we owned in Josie's French hometown, Poitiers. We spent four years renovating it, sold it and searched far and wide for a house we could afford and a community that was less stressful than Poitiers so that we could "Really Retire."
We finally found "A little house on the prairie". It's a one-bath, two-bedroom cement-block house at the end of the paved road. Any further is dirt roads for tractors and sheep, farm fields, and rabbits. The house is on 7 acres including a forest of Oaks, some over 3 feet in diameter. We also have a small pond with frogs and ducks, but no fish (yet).
Our nearest neighbor is a half-mile away. The closest hameau (collection of about 20 house) is four miles away. The nearest village, with grocery stores and fuel is 12 miles away. There are no streetlights. At night you can see a million stars. There seem to be about as many huge tractors as cars on very narrow one-lane roads. When we see one coming from the other direction we pull to the right as far as we can without putting our wheels in the deep ditch that borders all roads, then stop until the other vehicle makes it past.
We have made friends with most of our neighbors and get along with them ok. Josie and I also joined a network of French/American couples. Most couples are a Retired-GI husband who married a French girl while stationed in France in the sixties. Some are expats.
Our oldest son works in Los Angeles; another son lives in Poitiers and teaches English. Our youngest, our daughter, lives and works in Santa Rosa.
That's My Story. Richard or as I was known in High School "Dick".
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