[
During
the last years of his life, Francis worked with Dick to fill in the
gaps of his biography. Dick's comments and additions are in brackets
such as this.]
Travels with Eileen
Eileen and Francis started their serious travels with an Eastern
airlines (later Continental) get-up-and-go-passes. For an annual
fee of $999 each, they could travel once a week except for certain
blackout periods. This allowed them to frequently visit their 6
out-of-state children:
Trips typically centered around the family Diaspora. They visited
Paul and Cindy’s family in Roslyn, WA.; Mark in LA (both North
Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley); Dick and Pietrina’s family in
Houston; Mary and Jim in Dallas; Alice and Martha in the Phoenix area
before either were married. Generally if the family had more
little children, they were visited more often as Eileen liked her
little grandchildren.
Every year Francis and Eileen would renew their passes, usually with a
$100 increase. Eventually Continental took over the bankrupt
Eastern and eventually ended the pass for senior citizens.
|
| While Eileen and Francis
traveled often with their airline passes and scattered family starting
around 1980, they had vacationed (usually with some of their smaller
kids) throughout Francis's working career. Per Tom: June, 1952. Dad
left a good-sized box of Kodachrome slides of a Kiwanis trip to Seattle
by way of Yellowstone, Banff, and Victoria. They also did the
Grand Coulee Dam (shown here) and Vancouver, taking trains on the way
out and flying back from Seatac. |
Other trips included Norfolk, VA, where Don and Leonilla Hones
(Eileen’s Nazareth classmate) were house-sitting a former ambassador’s
mansion filled with museum-quality memorabilia. Philip was
visited during his cardiology rotation in Biddeford, Maine, near
Portland. There they visited Bowdoin and Bath. Francis was
impressed by the huge trees on the Bowdoin campus where Longfellow took
his undergraduate years.
In 1990 they visited the Maynards in Gulf Shores, Alabama, near
Pensacola, Florida. From there they traveled to Baton Rouge,
Louisiana to visit the Balfor family. (Kay Balfor was the sister
of Leonilla Hones). The Balfors also had 12 children, all of whom
attended Louisiana State University and were employed as lawyers or
chemical engineers at the many energy companies that spread themselves
up and down the Mississippi. One of the Balfor’s children rented
a hotel room on the Mardi Gras parade route every year. He
invited Francis and Eileen to see the parade.
Once they flew to Albuquerque and then drove to El Paso to visit Barbara LaBranche Martin, a niece of Eileen.
Their retirement went smoothly
|
Frances
has written little here of his travels, but as a habitual photographer,
he has left behind many pictures of trips here unmentioned. Above
is a 93 trip to Japan -- and many of the people he visited came to see
him in Garden City. In general, if you told him, "Come vist me
sometime," he would. See Tom's albums for some of these photos.
|
Solo
After Eileen’s death, Francis continued to travel, visiting in the San
Diego area with Mark and James Schmitt (son of Francis’s youngest
brother Don); Dr. George Rosenberg (a WWII friend) in Abbeyville, South
Carolina; a visit to Dick and Pietrina (with Auntie Ev) to Paris for 2
weeks in May of 2000 (including side trips to Normandy and Lisieux);
and Portugal/Spain/Southern France in September of 2002 – a trip to
many Catholic shrines such as Fatima, Avila, Santiago De Compostela,
and Lourdes; and a whirlwind tour to help Dick introduce Jane to the
upper Midwest relatives in three days/1600 miles (the Bridenstines in
Kalamazoo, Joe in Chicago, Martha in St. Cloud) returning through the
upper Peninsula and stopping at Michael and Debby’s and then finally
arriving to dinner at Phil and Cheryl’s.)
[Francis was a detailed keeper of
records and his contributions to the family newsletters were often such
lists. Eileen insisted that they never stay with people long enough to
wear out one's welcome. Francis didn't believe in that and would
come for weeks -- but was such a gentle and low maintenance visitor
that hosts wouldn't mind the stay and relish the company.]
[Missing here is the story that demonstrates both Francis's sense of
adventure as well as his tenacity in photographing his life.
While on a trip to the Holy Land, he fell into the Dead Sea.
We'll resurrect his family letter and add that section to this story
some day.]
