Another Son, an Honorable Discharge and Home

Shortly after I got home from Lakenheath hospital Cathy decided we needed to have another child.  We needed to take advantage of the healthcare we had in the Air Force or as it turned out, what we had in England.   So we did.  

The idea was that she was going to have her baby at home with a midwife.  She did all of the pre-natal with an English doctor and midwife and the pregnancy went well.  Our home was visited and her pregnancy and health were evaluated and we were approved for a home birth.  The night of May the 9^th I called the health service and Mrs. Roselli, the midwife we had already met, a Polish woman, arrived at the house and took over.  She had a nurse with her from Kenya.  Our friend Anna came over to help out.  Later a doctor arrived.  Mrs. Roselli said he wasn’t needed but came because there was nothing else to do. He knew to stay out of Mrs. Roselli's way.  

In the middle of the night, the wee hours of May 10^th, the Kenyan nurse delivered the baby under Mrs. Roselli’s careful eye.  During the birth the doctor sat in the corner and made comments.  Most of the night before that I sat in the dining room with Anna and drank Vodka and lime juice.  Mrs. Roselli made a pointed remark about her own teetotaler status, but I don’t remember being drunk, just excited.  I went into the bedroom and stood by the side of the bed and watched the birth. 

I remember when the baby was born they laid him down on the bed beside Cathy and he was all blue and didn’t move.  For a terrible moment I thought he was stillborn but then he screamed and his little body bloomed in color.  For me it was an instant of death and resurrection in less than a minute.  They attended to him and we had a new son.  Ted, Edward Charles Duggan, screamed for the rest of the morning.  When he was awake he screamed.  He definitely let the world know he had come.  He had a good voice. 

We were exhausted.  The nurse and midwife cleaned up and left.  We were at home, we had a new baby in the bed and it was done.  After the sun rose I brought Sean in, Sean was 2 years old, to see his new brother.  Later that day another nurse came to visit.  I left and went to register the birth at the registry office downtown. 

I think it was that summer that I was finally accepted by the Airman Education Commissioning Program, something I had applied for years before.  If I wanted to stay in the Air Force they would send me to college and then I would be an officer and serve another six years.  I was ready to get out.  It had seemed attractive half way through my enlistment but with only months to go it was no longer attractive.  I was accepted at UCLA and San Francisco State.  We decided it was better to return home to LA and so I made plans to attend UCLA. 

The last few months in the service were very comfortable.  We loved England and we had learned to live with the Air Force.  Being a staff sergeant was much easier than being an airman. 

We left England in August and arrived in Los Angeles in time for one of the hottest periods ever in LA.  I remember one day the temperature reached 127° in the San Fernando Valley.  We bathed Ted our new baby in a cool bath and after one visit to my parents in Burbank stayed in El Segundo with Cathy’s parents where the temperature was only in the high 100s. 

We found an apartment in North Hollywood in a subsidized housing complex and I started UCLA in October.