GITTY

    Many have wondered why the older generation always referred to me as Gitty.  It is a product of my childhood years when most second generation Chinese were known by their Chinese names.  Some of those names, but not all, were Anglicized into nicknames.  Wah became Wahby, Bock became Bocky, Duck became Ducky, etc.  My name is Git (which means distinguished person), hence, Gitty.  I didn’t think it was too hot because in English the nickname sounds too much like a not very flattering adjective.  Many of my mother’s friends also called me “Ah Bot” because I was the eighth child, but then would I have been called Botty?

    Eight is an auspicious number for Cantonese and represents good fortune.  However, being the eighth child was not always filled with good fortune.  Being eighth meant that there were seven siblings using you to hone their parenting skills which leads to an overdose of

    Brother Wing was born in China, Kin in Palo Alto, and the rest of us were born in Menlo Park; either at Kuck’s Menlo Park Hotel and Picnic Grounds (originally part of Camp Fremont of WWI) or 655 Oak Grove Avenue (now the Menlo Park Post Office).  All eight of the Chuck siblings attended Central Grammar School in Menlo Park and Sequoia High School in Redwood City.  Wing graduated from Sequoia in 1929 when I was six months old.  In 1946, seventeen years later, I graduated from Sequoia, preceded by a family reputation for outstanding academic and cultural achievements.  I was selected to attend Boys’ State in Sacramento by the American Legion that year, but that session was cancelled because of victory celebrations marking VJ Day, the end of the fighting war of WWII.

    I attended San Jose State College (now a State University) from 1946 to 1948, majoring in Engineering, preceded there by Wing, Kin, John and Yeng (I think she graduated in 1949).  In 1946, there were over 6000 students on a campus that was intended for less than 2000.  I was a 17 year-old competing with WWII veterans on the GI Bill, most of whom wanted to be engineers too.  I worked part-time at the National Dollar Store in San Jose and the State Meat Market in Sunnyvale to help finance my education, but the pay was too meager to meet that need or my growing desire for the good things in life.  My solution was to join the Navy to see the world and to qualify for the GI Bill.

    My second and third cruises were during the Korean War.  The St. Paul was the flagship (meaning that the Commanding Admiral and his staff were headquartered aboard) of the Seventh Fleet.  Among the duties were patrolling the Taiwan Straits between China and Taiwan as a blockade against any incursion by the PRC.  The St. Paul went on to participate in the second invasion of Inchon, Korea, where a forty-foot tide left the ship literally stuck in the mud of the Yellow Sea.  One of the unique naval battles of that cruise was a gun fight with North Korean tanks at Chongjin, the northernmost city on the east coast of Korea.

    Much of the second and third cruises were spent at sea (ninety days at a time):  launching and recovering aircraft, providing shore bombardment, or rescuing pilots of damaged aircraft who had to ditch in the water.  The St. Paul was the last UN ship out of Hungnam, the port city of Wonsan, on Christmas Eve, 1951, after evacuating troops that were retreating from the Chinese at the Yalu Reservoir (on the border between China and North Korea).  Our departure followed the destroying facilities at the port and gun battles with tank and artillery fires from the advancing North Korean and Chinese troops to assure the safe departure of the transport ships.

    During that period in Sacramento, I met and married Bettie Fong from Portland, Oregon, who was working for the USGS as a Delineator (she drew maps).  She was a GS7 and I was a GS5.  We lived in an apartment on 10th and V Streets when Matt and Marty were born.  We bought our first house on Niantic Way in South Sacramento where we lived until 1969.  Roger was born when we were living there.  We visited the neighborhood once after we had moved out and found that the new owner had painted the house a hot pink.

    While working for Copley, my accomplishments received interest throughout the newspaper industry because many of them faced the same tasks to update their production technology.  Among the clients that wanted my help was a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  They invited Bettie and I to be their gusts for two weeks.  It was Bettie’s first trip away from the West Coast.  She didn’t decide to go until a week before my departure.  Since she didn’t have a passport, she had to travel by herself at a later date.  She has dome long stories about her experiences in changing planes at O’Hare and JFK airports.  Other than getting sick and losing her luggage for a few days, I think she had a good time.  We had left the boys with a baby sitter in Sacramento.  They must have had a good time, because, to Bettie’s dismay, they didn’t miss us at all and barely recognized us on our return.

    When the Sacramento project for Copley was completed, we moved to San Diego to work out of the Copley corporate offices in La Jolla.  It was sad to leave all of our friends and relatives in Sacramento.  WE lived in an apartment near La Mesa and San Diego State while our house in University City was being completed.  It was a great three-level house overlooking San Clemente Canyon.  Our weekends were occupied with the zoo at Balboa Park, the tide pools at Point Loma and learning to sail our Lido 14 on Mission Bay.

    In 1970, we moved to San Antonio, Texas, after being hired by Harte-Hanks Newspapers to assist them in taking the company public.  The move dismayed many friends and relatives that were on the waiting list to visit San Diego.  WE lived in the Hill Country outside of San Antonio.  There were over forty oak trees in our back yard and all sorts of critters that looked in the window day and night.  The boys became gun-toting, motorcycle-riding, Rednecks during the four years that we lived there.  When Ma and Kin came to visit, we took them out to dinner in Houston (about 170 miles away) because that was the closest good Chinese restaurant.

    We moved to Palo Alto in 1974, after starting a manufacturing and consulting business here.  The economy at that time went badly and so did the company.  We closed the business in 1978 and I became a gypsy until 1982, when I went to work for the Navy Strategic Systems Program Office at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation in Sunnyvale, as a Product Assurance Engineer on the Trident Missile Program.  During my last four years with the program, I worked with the UK Ministry of Defense on their program and traveled to England four to five times a year.  I retired from working for a living in 1994 to enjoy the fruits of Social Security and a government pension. 

    I am still living my life story and the ensuing chapters might be better narrated than somebody other than me.

Palo Alto, CA  2001