Saturday, February 8, 1958 at 2:00PM, Charles Lloyd Escue and Bernice Laverne Foukal were wed in the Evangelical Covenant Church in Silverhill, Alabama. This was the first wedding held in the church's new building. Lloyd's parents came from Tennessee by bus and arrived on Friday afternoon. They stayed at the Foukal house and Lloyd stayed with the Mayer household. Bernice's grandparents in Idaho did not come down for the ceremony but sent the couple $200.00 as a wedding gift instead. There were about fifty people in attendance and a very nice reception followed in the fellowship part of the church. After the reception the wedding couple headed for Panama City, Florida for a brief honeymoon.

Charles Lloyd Escue was born January 7, 1938 in Madison County, Tennessee. His parents were James Lloyd and Annie Pruitt Cherry Escue. He was the oldest of ten children as mentioned in the previous chapter. The second oldest was his sister Ann who was almost two years younger. After Ann was Alvin, three and a half years younger, and then his other sister Carolyn, who was six years younger. Now that would have been the perfect family with two boys and two girls but over the next seven and a half years there were six more boys born. They were Carthel, Vince, Harvel, Clifton, Qulin and Nolan in that order. Nolan was thirteen and a half years younger than Lloyd, where Melvin was almost fifteen years younger than Bernice.

Lloyd, as the oldest, grew up as a hard-working farm boy who knew from an early age that he wanted to do something other than farm for a living. He went to Memphis after graduating from high school in 1956 and got a job driving a delivery truck for a car parts business. Always looking for ways to move up, he saw a help wanted ad in the newspaper one day for cable installers with Western Electric. He answered the ad and was hired. The company transferred him to Montgomery and that is where he was when Bernice went to Montgomery to begin her business school in 1957.

After the honeymoon they went back to Silverhill to pick up their things and then it was back to Montgomery, Alabama. Bernice returned to her studies at school and Lloyd was back on his job and hoping to not be sent away from Montgomery so often. They used the $200.00 they got as a wedding present from the Kuceras as a down payment on a 28-foot house trailer. They bought it second hand from a friend who was in the Air Force stationed in Montgomery. The price was $1300.00 and their payments were about the same as what they would have been paying as rent somewhere. The trailer had a air conditioner in it that made it quite nice. It had a timer setup on it where they could time it to come on before they arrived and thus have it cooled down already when they walked in. Bernice found a full-time job doing bookkeeping for a business and was making $200.00 a month. Her office there was air conditioned and that made it nice. By April she had all of her schooling finished except for one test in shorthand. She and Lloyd went to Silverhill for Easter. They took Linda to a square dance at the Little Hall while there and she loved it.

Rose wrote to her folks following the Easter visit and told them about how easy to get along with Lloyd was. Everyone noticed his great sense of humor. They made another visit down to Silverhill over the 4th of July. Lloyd helped Walter finish planting some beans. On Sunday they all went to the Gulf to enjoy some swimming. Rose just couldn't get over how well everyone got along when Lloyd came down. Bernice had tried to tell everyone what a great guy Lloyd was and now they all were in total agreement with her. They made the trip down in a used 1956 Chevy Bel-Air they had purchased. When it was time for the Escues to head back to their home in Montgomery, Bernice would raid the garden and the freezer for meat, fresh vegetables and baked goods. Later in July Lloyd and Bernice added a 17" portable TV set to their trailer.

Lloyd really liked Baldwin County. He said his ambition was to someday own a small farm and build a nice house and have a steady job in Mobile. Note the words "steady job" in the last sentence. He did not want their income to depend on farming. Lloyd enrolled in a night school that would help him attain a First Class Radio Technician License. That license would open the door for a much better paying job. Inflation was very evident at this point in time as the cost of a first class stamp jumped from three cents to four cents.

They made a weekend trip up to Tennessee in August to visit with Lloyd's family and Labor Day weekend and the weekend of Bernice's birthday was spent down in Silverhill. Lloyd went fishing with Walter and Melvin and the ladies went shopping. On Sunday they went picnicking at the Gulf. Lloyd was doing very well in his classes in electronics. His goal was to finish the course, get his First Class license and then get a good job in Mobile so they would be closer to Baldwin County. He then hoped to buy some land around the area and build a home. The good jobs with good pay were in Mobile but the cost of living was much lower over in Baldwin County. Their trailer was already almost paid for. Rose said that Lloyd would kid Bernice about being stingy but in a proud sort of way.

They spent Thanksgiving with the Escue family and Christmas with the Foukals. Lloyd made a true friend out of Linda when he fixed an old radio there that she could move into her room. She had taken over Bernice's room after she left.

Early in 1959, due to a recession, Lloyd got laid off from his job with Western Electric. Most people would see this as a huge setback in their life, and certainly that would be the case to a couple who had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary. Bernice was working full time in a new job that paid $250.00 a month working five days a week. Her pay was enough to pay the bills so they decided that Lloyd should accelerate his studies towards obtaining his radio license by going to school full time. He had been attending just night school before his layoff. In the late spring he finished his course and was off to Atlanta to take the test for his license. It took about six weeks to get the test results and during that time he got called back to work by Western Electric. The pay at Western Electric was very good so it was not a desperate situation awaiting the outcome of his first attempt at passing that very difficult test. When the test results arrived in the mail, his First Class License was included. Lloyd was now qualified for not only maintenance on two-way radios for companies like Motorola, but could work in any commercial television or radio station as well. The goal of getting a job in Mobile and moving to Baldwin County mentioned on the previous page was now possible to fulfill.

While on a trip down to Baldwin County during the summer, Lloyd went over to Mobile and called on the Motorola Service Station (MSS) there. When he entered the shop, he noted that most of the employees license on the wall were Second Class Licenses. An employee with a second class license can only work on radios under the direct supervision of a person holding a first class license. Lloyd saw the opportunity and applied for a job and was pretty much hired right there on the spot. He gave his notice at Western Electric when they returned to Montgomery and they made plans to see if that 56 Chevy would actually pull that 28-foot trailer. It did, several times as you will see.

In August 1959 they moved to Spanish Fort, just across Mobile Bay from Mobile, where they stayed for one month. During that time Bernice got a Civil Service job at Brookley AFB in the accounting department. They only had the one car so in September they moved the trailer to Azalea Trailer Park which was convenient to both the MSS and Brookley. Bernice would drive Lloyd to the MSS in the morning and then go to her place of work. When she got off in the evening she would drive back to the MSS and pick him up when he got off. While Bernice had this government job, she had full benefits for both she and Lloyd. All of her salary was put into a savings account that was to be used to purchase some land that would someday fulfill their ongoing ambition already mentioned. Within six months Bernice was promoted to GS-3. She also found out about this time that she was being promoted to mother-to-be. She promotion caused her to be transferred to a different department at Brookley and as luck would have it she ended up working right next to a man who smoked cigars. This caused her to have to throw up quite often at work and led to a lifetime of hating the smell of cigar smoke. Isn't it nice that a person would not have to put up with something like that in today's workplace?

It was during this time in Mobile that Lloyd got to do something that he had wanted to do ever since he knew what an airplane was. He took flying lessons at an airport south of Mobile called St. Elmo. He didn't get to complete his training there but he at least got started.

In September of 1960 Hurricane Donna was bearing down on the Mobile area. Bernice was two weeks late on her delivery date for the baby. Friday night Bernice's water broke and Lloyd drove her to Mobile Infirmary. Also in their car as they drove to the hospital was everything of value that they could get in it just in case the storm seriously damaged their trailer. The worst of the storm was on Saturday and during that time Lloyd and Bernice sat together watching television in a waiting room. That evening was the Miss America Pageant and they watched that on TV. After 36 hours of labor during the worst of the storm, Sherry Lynn Escue was born on Sunday morning. When it was time to be leaving the hospital with Sherry another hurricane, this time named Ethel, had hit the area and it was impossible to drive across the causeway to Baldwin County because of flooding. The weekend following her birth, Sherry Lynn was finally able to be taken home. They went to the Foukal home so that Rose could help Bernice in caring for the baby for a week to allow her to regain her strength. After that first week, Lloyd and Bernice took their new daughter to their place back in Mobile. Sherry added a new generation to this family but five months later an earlier generation ended. Bernice's great-grandmother, Johanna Valcik Palat, died at the age of 86 in Buhl February 11, 1961 at 4:30PM.

It would seem that things were progressing very nicely at this point in turning dreams and ambitions into reality. Right after Christmas of 1960, Lloyd heard from his dad in Tennessee about an opportunity in management at the MSS in Memphis. Lloyd's position in Mobile was a technician and did not involve management in any way. A position in management would pay much better so this would be a way to get a quick promotion and bring in additional income at a time when it was really needed because Bernice was not working outside the home due to the new addition to the family. Since Lloyd's father had supplied this information, it was considered reliable. They decided to give it a go so Lloyd gave his two weeks notice to the MSS in Mobile and they started preparing to hitch up the 28-foot trailer to the 56 Chevy and hit the road to Memphis.

Upon arrival in Memphis they parked the trailer in a trailer park in West Memphis, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River. This actually made for a shorter drive to work plus the rent at this park was much more reasonable. Lloyd got settled into his job and all went well until payday rolled around. When Lloyd got his first paycheck it was nothing near what he had been led to expect. He met with the owner to find out what had gone wrong and the owner said that he was sorry but that was all he could afford to pay him at the time. His pay was no more than what he had been making in Mobile so this was a terrible disappointment to them. Well Lloyd had to keep on working but he immediately started looking everywhere for a new job. It didn't take him long to secure a job with a company that had a contract to install all sorts of communications equipment at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. While they were in Memphis, they traded their 28-foot trailer in on a 40-foot trailer. Sherry got her own room and the new trailer got its own towing service because the Chevy couldn't tow this one.

Lloyd wrote to his family in Tennessee on March 8, 1961 describing the area where they were then living. They were living in Waynesville, Missouri which is about 90 miles east of Springfield and 150 miles west of St. Louis. There were about 32 trailer parks there due to the huge US Army Post, 100 square miles and 40,000 personnel, nearby. The Escue family of three chose Elms Mobile Home Court, Lot 32.

The job was okay and the money was fine but the area was not like Mobile or Baldwin County. The one drawback about the job was that Lloyd worked a shift from 3:00PM till 11:00PM. He always kept his ear to the ground for other employment possibilities in better parts of the country. They made a trip back to Tennessee in June to visit the Escues and in July, Bernice's family, minus Walter, came for a visit on their way to Idaho by bus. In August Lloyd answered an ad for Pan American Airlines and was hired as a technician for some of their electronic equipment. The good news was the pay. It would amount to a very nice pay increase. The bad news was that they would have to relocate to Yuma, Arizona within the month. Well they sure were not fond of the area where they were living so the increase in pay spoke the loudest on whether to go or not to go. Lloyd gave his two-week notice and they prepared to go west, way west.

They made arrangements to have their trailer towed and were to call or write with instructions on exactly where to deliver it. Then they packed up what they could carry in the Chevy and headed to Tennessee for a visit with Lloyd's family. Silverhill was the next stop for a few days with the Foukals and then it was westward towards Arizona. Enroute to Yuma in September they stopped to visit with Lloyd's cousin, Sammie Escue, who lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. While there, Sammie told Lloyd about a company called Transco that was hiring radio technicians for their microwave links along their natural gas pipelines. Lloyd was immediately off to check this out personally and the result was his being hired and his training was to be right there in Baton Rouge. The pay was not quite as much as the job in Yuma was supposed to pay but the convenience of not having to move that far away from the south sure made sense. The phone call was made to Missouri with instructions to tow that trailer down south and bring it to Plank Road Mobile Home Park in Baton Rouge.

After about a of month of training, Lloyd's first assignment was to follow the pipelines to different stations and serve as a relief man for other technicians who were going on vacation. Transco was the first company Lloyd had been with that offered full benefits to the employee and his family. They seemed to be a family oriented company and so Lloyd and Bernice were very happy that things had worked out the way they did. Every where Lloyd was sent, Bernice and Sherry got to go. They stayed in a hotel or motel at every location where he was working. While staying in Laurel, Mississippi during the summer of 1961, Bernice taught Sherry how to swim.

February of 1962 Lloyd was moved to Stockbridge, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. The company payed to have the trailer moved there and they lived in the town of Rex, not far from Stockbridge. During the time they were located there, Lloyd continued his flight training out of an airport nearby. He did his cross-country work out of there, passed his written exam, and flight check ride there and earned his private pilot's license. Bernice and Lloyd joined a Baptist Church in Stockbridge and Bernice was baptized there.

While in Georgia, it was the same as back in Louisiana. Everywhere Lloyd was sent, Bernice and Sherry got to go. When Lloyd was on a job up in South Carolina, Bernice and Sherry were out sightseeing on their own and stopped at Kings Mountain National Military Park. They walked innocently into the battleground museum at 2:31PM on August 22nd and they were laying for her. Bernice became the National Park Service's one billionth visitor. Now that's an honor you don't see awarded once or twice a month like the Country Music Awards up in Nashville. There was a big writeup in the newspaper on this event. Surely it was one of the most memorable events in Sherry's life. After all, she was just three weeks short of her second birthday that day.

Transco transferred Lloyd to Appomattox, Virginia in September of 1962. The company furnished a house for the communications technician at Appomattox so the trailer was no longer needed. They sold it and used the money to buy furniture for the house where they would be living.

When they first arrived in Appomattox, they had to stay in a motel for a few days. That short hotel stay brought about an event that resulted in the birth of Michael Robert Escue, born nine months later in June 1963. When an Escue checks into a hotel in Virginia, you can bet the population is going to increase. Rose and Melvin came up to Virginia about the time Bernice came home from the hospital to help with Mike. While up there they got to see some of the sights up that way. When Mike was about ten days old they went to Monticello and in the family films one can get an idea of the kind of kid Melvin was at that age. These were good times spent in Appomattox for the family. Two Christmases were spent up there and it snowed both years. Some of these good times were captured on film and have been viewed by members of the family through the years. If you are reading this book and have not seen these films, ask to see them.

A month after Mike was born, Lloyd flew down to Cocoa, Florida to see some of his boyhood friends from Tennessee. There was a man that owned a mill in Scottsville, Virginia where one of the pumping stations that was in Lloyd's territory was located. This man owned an airplane but had poor eyesight. Lloyd flew the man down to Jacksonville and dropped him off and then went on to Cocoa to see his friends.

All was not good back at the Escue home in Tennessee. Lloyd's family fell into financial troubles and ended up losing their farm in late 1962. They left Tennessee and went to Leitchfield, Kentucky where they had been told that you could buy land reasonable. Even with reasonable prices on the land they could not afford the down payment on a place they hoped to buy. A plan was worked out where a farm with 84 ½ acres and a house on it was purchased and Lloyd and Bernice were 50% owners of the place for having to put up half of the money for the down payment and agreeing to make half of the annual payment on the mortgage. The farm cost $9,000.00 with a down payment of $3,000.00 and an annual payment of $600.00 for 15 years. Lloyd and Bernice borrowed $1500.00 for their half of the down payment. Bernice was very much against this because they had been saving the money from her employment for their own land purchase someday.

In September 1963, Lloyd's boss from Houston came up to Appomattox on an inspection trip and had very good things to say. Lloyd got a raise of $25.00 a month and the man encouraged him to take more time off. The family went on a day trip to Washington, D.C. the last weekend of the month. They left Appomattox at 5:00AM in the morning and arrived in D.C. at 8:30AM. They had a buggy for Mike and he was good all day as they saw some of the historical sites. Sherry had a great time too, according to the account of the day in Bernice's letter home. About 6:30PM they left Washington and headed for Front Royal, Virginia to stay the night so they could get an early start on the Skyline Drive for the trip back home on Sunday. They were home by 6:00PM.

In November the Escue foursome headed to Silverhill for Thanksgiving. On Friday, November 22, 1963, they were driving in their Volkswagen just outside Danville, Virginia when they heard on the radio that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. The president died within half an hour from his wounds and his death was announced to the world shortly thereafter. Two days later, Sunday November 24th, the man who was accused of killing the president, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot and killed while in custody of the Dallas police. This was a very historic and sad weekend. There would be others in our country.

Lloyd was about as high as he thought he could go with Transco there in Appomattox. He had put in a bid for a position with the company in Mississippi in September but it was already filled. He came in contact with a lot of people who worked for Motorola with his job and through talking with some of them he began to feel he could advance a little faster if he worked for Motorola. He put out some feelers and soon was leaving Transco and heading for Atlanta to join Motorola. He was trained there in Atlanta for a short time and then sent to Montgomery, Alabama as a service representative. Well now, did this town look familiar?

Lloyd's job with Motorola took him to all of the MSS's in his area of responsibility. He got to know the owners, the shop managers, and the key technicians as he advised them on the equipment they serviced that were manufactured by Motorola. In 1964 he was moved to Charlotte, North Carolina where Lloyd became the district service manager for Motorola. In this position he became acquainted with even more of the owners and managers of the MSS's throughout the southeast. While living in Charlotte, they bought a home at 1708 Tamworth Drive. This job was a nice step up in the corporate world of Motorola but it proved to be a very stressful position to be in. Lloyd very much desired to someday own his own business in the communications field. He was always looking for an opportunity to buy one of the MSS's if an owner should happen to be looking for a buyer.

Lloyd's brother Alvin married a girl from none other than Silverhill, Alabama in November 1965. Sherry started to school there in Charlotte in 1966 and her first day of school can be seen on the family films.

Rose Foukal spent many years of her life working at a Vanity Fair factory in Robertsdale as a quality control inspector. It has not been mentioned up until now because there were enough things going on in her life already. She started in 1965 and worked there long enough to be able to collect Social Security and to qualify for her retirement. Her salary supplemented the income from the farm and the benefits provided them with health insurance. Many garments for the girls in the family came from where she worked over the years.

In the fall of 1966 Lloyd suffered what was diagnosed as a heart attack in Charlotte and spent a month in the hospital. Before this happened, he had been talking seriously to Jerome Tanner, the owner of the Motorola Service Station (MSS) in Birmingham, Alabama, about the possibility of buying his business there. He was in good shape for Thanksgiving and Christmas. When his birthday came around in January, six-year-old Sherry baked him a birthday cake. Bernice related to her folks January 9th that his doctor had told him it was fine to proceed with plans of trying to buy the MSS in Birmingham

In February Lloyd and Bernice both went to Birmingham so Bernice could meet Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Tanner. They were still trying to work out the details of purchasing the business and they wanted to look for a place that they could rent if they moved there. They did find a three-bedroom house for rent that they liked and then returned to Charlotte. Among the details that had to be worked out were limiting the amount of salary that could be taken from the business by Lloyd and Bernice initially and the owner was insisting that they use his accountant as their accountant. The man that was the service manager with the MSS, Harold Tate, wanted to purchase the business for himself so that was a sensitive matter as well.