Year in Puerto Rico

We Spent a Year in Puerto Rico in the early '50s...

My father, Jesse Baily, was an engineer for 35 years with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Long Lines Division. In 1953, he was "on loan" to Western Electric for a year to help set up microwave stations and lay an underwater cable from what was then the Cape Canaveral Aerospace facility, now Cape Kennedy, to Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean. This cable was later used to track missile tests.

In order to be closer to dad, my mother and I went along for the year. By then, since my brother was in the Air Force and my sister was at college it was a good time for my mother to take a sabbatical from her teaching with the Denver Public Schools. We lived in a suburb of San Juan, Rio Piedras, and my mother, Sara Maxwell Baily, took classes at the University of Puerto Rico branch there. I attended third grade at an English-speaking elementary school named the Commonwealth School.

Memories of the our stay are still vivid after over forty years, and I have some interesting photographs I will eventually go through and insert into this narrative. This is a project that is currently on a back burner, but I hope to have completed before the end of this millennium. Stay tuned...

 

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