I arranged for a transfer to Honeywell's Riverside office so I wouldn't have to make the 100 mile round trip drive to Orange County each day and could be home earlier. Martha had to quit her job at Kwikset, which she had worked at since August 1975, because the commute drive was causing her blood pressure to rise. She didn't want to quit but I was glad she wasn't working because I didn't want her to have to be anything other than my wife, a mother and a housewife.
It was around this time that I quit Honeywell and had decided to start our own alarm company (Riverside Alarm Co.) that our daughter had convinced Martha to go to Long Beach to a five day conference called "Basic Youth Conflicts." They drove down each day for five days to attend this conference. Wow! Did it ever make a change in Martha! She seemed to blossom out into the woman that God had made her to be! Martha finally told me what had been bothering her all these years and causing her to drink. She quit drinking and our lives became so much fuller! Such a change I've never seen in anybody!
For several years Martha and I ran our alarm company together, working hand-in-hand to install and service the accounts that I had sold. She would pitch-in and do whatever was needed to help with the installations, billing and whatever else was needed. She really enjoy doing this with me. From time to time our daughter would also help us to install a security system when we needed the extra help. It was a 'real' family business.
Then on a very hot and smoggy day in late 1983, while we were sitting at Denny's restaurant on University street in Riverside having pie and coffee, we began to talk about the possibility of selling our house and business and moving somewhere where it wasn't so hot and smoggy. That was when we decided to move to Washington State. After doing some research on Washington State we decided to move to Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle. We contacted the state offices about getting our alarm license in Washington and did what we thought was necessary to own and operate an alarm company in Washington State. We had also made arrangements for an apartment so we had a place to move to when we got there.
We then sold our alarm company and put our house on the market. On January 27, 1984, the day we were to move, our daughter told us that she wasn't going to move with us. She wanted to stay in California and had made arrangements to move in with a friend in Devore. Needlessly to say, the entire 1200 mile drive to Washington State Martha cried because our daughter wasn't with us. I looked at it as a new beginning, with just the two of us, but Martha didn't see it that way. I guess all mothers feel this way when their children move out of the house.
When Martha's sister and brother-in-law, Marion and Ernie, found out that we were going to move to Washington State they decided to move there too. They left California about a week before we did. They moved to Puyallup, which was about 45 miles south from Bellevue where we lived. Marion, Ernie and their two children, Ernie Jr. and Marty Lynn, lived in a very little apartment not two blocks from where they hold the Washington State Fair each year.
Not too long after we made our move Martha and I decided to return to California. This decision was prompted by several reasons. One, that our daughter didn't come with us. Two, that the only people we knew, Martha's sister and brother-in-law, lived so far away. And finally, that Washington State required far more in the way of licensing for our alarm company than we were told about when I had called from California. I also had to attend a bankrupt meeting in California for a fellow that I had leased some equipment. He had sold the equipment and filled bankruptcy on us.
During our move back to California we were at a rest stop in Oregon, looking at the Rouge River that flowed beside the highway, when Martha told me that she really didn't want to move back to California! I told her that she should have told me that 24 hours before so we wouldn't have rented the U-Haul truck and moved. We decided that we would go back to California and take care of some business and then move back to Washington State.
We arrived in Moreno Valley (Sunnymead) in September 1984 to stay with a friend our ours Adele, who lived directly across the street from where we had sold our home. The bankruptcy meeting didn't amount to anything and we were just out the entire three-thousand dollars the equipment had cost us.
We then packed-up and made the move back to Bellevue in December of 1984 to the same apartment complex (Kona Village) we had lived in before. Only this time we moved into a two bedroom apartment that was upstairs.
During this time Martha secured a job at a company directly across the street from where we lived. At first she worked days, which wasn't too bad since I worked during the day to sell alarm systems for our new company, A-1 Security Systems. Later, when they transferred her nights, things got a little worse since I didn't like being home alone until midnight when Martha got off work. Our alarm company wasn't doing very well and we decided to move back to California. Martha's brother Manual, who lived in Sacramento, suggested that we move-in with him until we got a new alarm company up and running. So in January of 1986 we made the move to Sacramento.
When we got to Sacramento we moved in with Martha's brother Manual and his wife Irma and her son Presley. This was the same month that the space shuttle 'Challenger' exploded. Our plans were to start our own alarm company from their house and to get our own place as soon as possible. Our plans didn't work-out so, on our anniversary February 7th. 1986, we decided to move down to Fullerton and stay with Martha's mother Marty and see if we could get our alarm company started there.
As it turned out this wasn't a good move either. Shortly after we moved in with Marty our van was broken into and most of our alarm installation tools were stolen. Also Marty had suffered some mild strokes, which changed her personality somewhat. This caused some problems because her personality was so erratic. We stayed with her until September 1986 and then moved to where my folks lived in a trailer park in Anaheim.
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