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But the first thing with a bicycle was get myself a blackboard and I found one a lady had in the basement of an on-post recreation center no longer needed. It was big, six feet by four high. Somehow I was able to balance it on a bicycle and ride it to my barracks, a distance of probably only a half mile or so. I nailed it up on the wall over my bed. And then I made a small companion shelf at the bottom edge to hold a large Webster's dictionary. I was going to use it to write intellectual formulas and principles but found I had not much to say but that it was a great prop. The commanding Major and upper echelons loved it and it was put on the barracks tour for big-wigs.
It was on a bike, and they were big-tire American like Schwinn, brakes on the petals, that I met MaryJ as she was coming out of the Washington Monument elevator door. I surrounded her with my bike circling 'round and around until she talked to me. And that was the big change in my career.
From then on when I crossed the river, I had someone to meet usually after she got off work maybe about four. She was Antioch College Ohio on a student work program for government affairs. She lived with a friend but found a small studio on the campus of George Washington University, just above the State Department for the two of us, on a tree lined street next to a university fraternity.
Back in the army we got a new Executive Officer second in command with very high scores out of Officer Training School. But he didn't want to be in the same building with the company clerk Whom - who did deals all day long with Pentagon personnel - and so he removed his office down to the supply building. Then the major put me in the vacated XO office next to his. But I still had to be there by six, even if I was living across the river with MaryJ, but still I left usually by two in the afternoon.
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