Toritto – A Life In Pictures – #8

Give my regards to Broadway!  Standing in front of the Christian Science reading room

And so in March 1964 the newly married Toritto and JoAnn moved to a small apartment on High Street in Ayer, Massachusetts, just outside of Ft. Devens, the Army Security Agency training school.  We lived in 3 rooms on the top floor.

She found a job at ITT Surprenant in Lowell, the aging, declining mill town; the mills long gone.  A number of other Army wives found work there and those without a car, like us, would be pick up by those with transportation in return for contributing to gasoline costs.  And so the “Lowell” wives would ride each day together to work.  I too got a ride to post each day.  The benefit is that we made lots of friends; friendships last lasted many years.

July 18, 1964.  She dated it.

And so the Summer passed and soon it became time to request our permanent duty stations and in turn learn what we got.  I asked for a station in the United States and Europe as a second choice, either of which would have allowed us to live together.

I got Eritrea, on the horn of Africa.

A weekend visit to her cousin’s home.

This was the Army Security Agency (which reported to the NSA) intelligence school where I was trained in 1964.  After Vietnam the Agency was disbanded as an independent command and it’s functions merged into Army combat units.  The school buildings were simply abandoned.

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