OUR LIFE IN SALT LAKE CITY

THE STREET WHERE WE LIVED
IN SALT LAKE CITY IN 1980
Our social life, which I have said before was a very active one in Quito, during the first few months of our stay was almost non existent in Salt Lake City. That made us a bit home sick, but, slowly and consistently we began to develop a relationship with a few friends in our neighborhood, among whom our dearest ones were Wilmer (a former LDS bishop) and Nelly Barnett, our next door neighbors, whose children had already gone from home (Wilmer is the Angel who saved me from the effects of the first snow storm in early October 1980); Dennis & Marilyn Adams and their three lovely children; Murry and Nancy Bemis and their three children (the only non LDS couple in the neighborhood besides us); Ken and Roma Clark, whom I got to see last January and have kept themselves in very good shape); Piero Ruffinengo and Tony Durando (engineers and lawyers, Italian and were about my age), both of whom worked for Northwest Pipeline also, and were married to Jennifer ( a medical doctor) and Nann (a lawyer) respectively. Piero and Tony had just started to grow their own families and had young children too; Joe Vallely, who at the time was Northwest’s HR VP, and his lovely wife Ceres (from Puerto Rico) who later on became Angie’s God Mother, were also a very important part of our small social circle. Ceres Vallely, and her lovely mother Angela, became one of our closest friends and later on she became Angie’s baptism’s God Mother. We also met and became very good friends with Oscar and Mina Abeyta, the finest people from Mexico which we have ever met. We have kept in touch with them throughout these many years until these days. They have a daughter who married and came to live in Tampa, FL, not very far from Orlando, where we live one half of the year.

THE ADAMS' HOUSE IN FONTAINEBLEU DR.
IN SLC AS SEEN IN JANUARY 2010

Most of our neighbors were very friendly and helpful to us, but, Dennis and Marilyn Adams and their children need to be mentioned especially. Marilyn, who passed away only a year and a half ago, was the sweetest lady one can think of. In spite of the fact she had been suffering from a serious illness for a long time, no one in my family can remember one single time when she was not in a good mood, smiling and trying to be helpful. At two years of age, our youngest daughter, Angie became very independent and would walk away from home to go visiting either Mrs. Barnett, who became her main candy supplier, or Marilyn for other sweets. One of those days, Marilyn found Angie happily sharing lunch with their little dog, eating from the dog’s plate. Over the last 28 years, this story has remained and will continue to be one of the favorite subjects of our conversations with the Adams’, every time we get together, provoking our uncontained laughter. In January of 2010, I visited Dennis and had dinner with him and his family, at their always warm and welcoming home, in Fontainebleau Dr where he lives by himself. Dennis continues to be a happy looking man. He is a great cook, and once he fixed the best hash browns I have ever had in my whole life.

THE CLARKS AT THEIR HOME IN SLC IN JANUARY 2010

The Bemis also became our dear friends. We helped them make personal arrangements with our dearest friends the Angeleris in their Buenos Aires, Argentina, to have Gail, their 16 year old daughter go to Buenos Aires and spend a summer with them. Gail, a beautiful and very charming girl, had a great time in Argentina and the two families became great friends thereafter. I suspect that it was Gail’s fascination with the Spanish Language one of the reasons that made her fall in love, and then get married to a Spanish speaking young man from Mexico, with whom they now have three beautiful children. I saw them in Salt Lake City in January 2010, when I went there skiing and took some time to visit our Utah friends. Nancy Bemis also lives by herself, after her husband passed away many years ago. She lives right next door to the Adams. It was Nancy who, in our early days in SLC, was trying to help Fanny learn English by speaking so slow it got to be kind of funny.



NANCY BEMUS AT HER HOME IN SLC IN JANUARY 2010


She used to greet Fanny like this: Gooood moooorning Faaanny, hooooow aaaare youuu?, caaan Iiiiii beee oooof heeeelp thiiiis mooorniiing?, and she continued to talk like that to Fanny for a long time after she made sure Fanny was on track with her English. That just tells the helping attitude all our friends had with us while we lived in SLC.

Over time, Tony and Nann Durando became our dearest friends, and have remained so all of these many years after we left Salt Lake City and the U.S. Tony and I talk two or three times a year and when we do, we do it for an hour or more till our ears hurt. We have many things in common, mainly a most old fashioned concept of what a family should be, and we are very proud of our families and love and care for all and every one of their members. We have recently become grand parents and we are deeply in love with our grand children too.


VISITING THE DURANDOS IN SLC IN 1981


During our stay in Salt Lake City, the Durandos and our family began to visit one another with certain frequency, as a result, we were able to develop a closer relationship, which we have maintained and improved over time. Their oldest daughter Chiara came to visit us and stayed with us in Guayaquil during the summer of 1992; Fanny and I saw them again in mid 1997, in Tucson, AZ, where they have lived since the late 80’s, and we saw them again in Phoenix, AZ, at the end of April of 2000, when Mariuxi, our oldest daughter graduated from Thunderbird, The American International School of Business as a Master of International Business. Tony and Nann drove the 500 miles from Tucson, to be with us during that great day for our family. Tony and I maintain a fluid correspondence via internet and among other things, I have promised Tony that I will learn Italian (which I’m doing so), and he has promised me to improve his already fluent Spanish.
On the work front, at Northwest Pipeline, during my first few weeks at the home office, nobody knew what my responsibilities were going to be; later on and for a few months, I was assigned meaningless responsibilities, it was like they brought me in without a clear plan, no one was in charge of me, and no one would care about the cost of having me there. I began to wonder whether I made the right decision when accepting to move to Salt Lake City without a clear definition of what my new job was going to be. I understood later that in a big corporation like Northwest Pipeline, the decision making process was slow, sometimes very slow and some other times extremely slow. I was drawing a very good salary but I was not producing anything in return, and that made me feel concerned and somehow guilty. I had to be patient, but at the same time I was beginning to feel a bit nervous about the whole thing. It wasn’t until March of 1981, that my former boss Glenn Nelle, in Houston, at my request, took the initiative and suggested my presence in his office beginning mid April. He wanted me to be in charge of the controllership of APCO Argentina, the Northwest’s affiliate located in Houston, TX.
In my next posting: HOUSTON IS OUR NEW HOME TOWN