21. Home to the States After Two Years: East Africa a New Life Adventure

When we arrived in Portland, Grandpa Cochrane (my father) met us at the airport. I realize now what an imposition that was.  Nehalem, Oregon, is at least a two hour drive from the Portland airport, and the terminal is on the west side of Portland. So he had to negotiate Portland traffic twice. I am sure he grumbled and I do not blame him, but it was good to see him and my Mother again. In a few days we had bought a car and headed to Idaho.  Unfortunately we found the house in Middleton had been treated badly and had a big clean up job to do. I do not remember details about the renter, but besides running a Cock Fighting Scheme,  he had knocked holes in the wall and doors in the bedrooms.  I don’t think we ever tried to  live there again.  We settled in a small house in Meridian owned by my parents until we could purchase five acres south of Meridian on Lake Hazel road from my brother Jim and began to build a new home for the family.  


We had a trailer house at Middleton that I had bought in a fire sale before the African adventure.  We had it pulled to the five acres as a starting point for a new house.  Building always goes slow when you need housing.  I started to work for Boise Schools and I was appointed as School Liaison Coordinator with The Boise Model Cities Program. The program was a Federally funded Project to coordinate projects to improve sections of the city that were diagnosed as substandard. I worked with Model Cities for three and a half years writing several programs coordinating three to four agencies at a time, to improve the lives of residents of the city. 


Starting in this same time period Barbara and I along with children as they were available started to remodel houses.  Generally we would buy a house remodel and resell it working on one at a time.  We did two in the North end of Boise and two in Nampa and all the time working on our own home in Meridian.  As time went on we, with the help of my brothers, built a new house for my parents on Locust Road Nampa. The house was designed by my older brother, Byron.  Another building project we took on was building a house for my older brother that was to be built in Hawaii. 


Byron had designed a single wall structure. I did the working drawings and a bill of materials. My younger brother Jim had the lumber cut to match the Bill of Materials, which was then loaded into two Rail Road Shipping Containers  and shipped to Hawaii. Jim, and I then flew over to build the house. Barbara flew over for a little vacation as we finished the construction.  The house was built on 7 acres of a coffee plantation on the Big Island and a couple years later Barbara and I went over at coffee harvest time and participated in picking coffee.

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