The 1950s were busy years for Mom. Besides raising two boys, cooking three meals a day, being a church pianist and making visits to her mother in LaRue, she was president of the local music club.
Dad was busy too, responsible for the plant operation and personnel.
Living next to a plant that produced liquified petroleum gases such as butane and propane was not without its dangers. I remember being awakened abruptly one night by the plant whistle, sounding over and over. My folks grabbed us out of bed and drove us out of the camp a safe distance away, where we joined other evacuated families. The danger passed and we returned home, but I couldn't sleep in the unfamiliar silence--the plant engines* had been shut down.
*For years I thought the loud engines in the plant were running gas compressors. (There is a sentence to that effect in the acknowledgments section of my book.) My boyhood friend Tip, whose father and uncle worked inside the plant, recently corrected my mistaken impression. The engines were connected to huge vacuum pumps which sucked gas out of wells and into the plant for processing.
Dad, somewhere inside the plant, 1950s.