Linda and George

[Jan Lundquist]

Paul...I am up to Chapter 15, The story reads smoothly, and the burgeoning romance still crackles. So far, I have nothing to say about what Townsend may or may not have discovered, but quite a bit to say about Linda.

We became acquainted through this forum...I admired the fluency of her writing, as Elizabeth Helen Drake, her nom de plume for that time, and I had reached out to her. Linda responded as herself. As I had suspected, we were both denizens of the high desert.

We vibed with each other when we met, and we became good buds who laughed a lot, until the time of the Great Collapse. Yes, you broke her heart when you abandoned the book. I suggested she write her own story in the form of a memoir. It would be cathartic, and easy as most of it had already been written in her journals and recollected accounts for you. I would help her edit them for continuity.

Over the the next months, I met Linda's husband, George and her daughter, and grandson. I quite liked George. He brought some first person Townsendiana to the tale that I had not heard before.

He said had begun to realize that Townsend might be "someone," while he and Linda were visiting the Browns in the Stanford/San Jose area. Townsend had taken George on a tour of an engineering research building (SRI, presumably) and he had been super-impressed that his future FIL had the run of the building, seeming to know some one everywhere, even down in the basement room where experiments on plants were being conducted.

In and around that time frame Townsend hired George to dig up the lawn of the family residence (the Atherton House, IIRC) and bury some sort of in ground antenna for him. One day, Townsend brought a visitor out to watch the work-in-progress, and though he could not make out all of their conversation, George overheard talk of a plan in the works to take all of the cash out of a South American town to see how people coped. This story clenched George's impression that Townsend moved in some rarified air, so it seemed perfectly normal to him later, that he would be called upon to row Townsend out to a visiting submarine, moored in the Catalina Harbor.

I suspect Townsend would have loved it if George were of a more scientific bent, but he is the Good Old Boy epitome, gregarious, pragmatic and happiest when he is under the hood of a car. At the time we met, George and Linda were living on a 5 acre ranch in the San Gorgonio foothills and the pair stayed busy, either with property improvements, or with hunting down parts for the many trucks and cars sprinkled in and around George's 3 bay workshop/garage.

But Linda had been fired up by the chance to work with you, to really dig into her father's life, in a way that would help her to make sense of it. She went, emotionally, and whole-heartedly all in on your joint endeavor. George, though, had no time or interest for it, but she persisted. Ultimately this drove them apart.

Linda often said to me, there would come a time when she would need to disappear. I don't think she knew how or why or when, and I think she put it off as long as she could. She went poof, for me, in 2019. I miss her. I hope she comes back around again. But for now I like to believe that she and "Morgan" and are living happily ever after, somewhere.

[Jan Lundquist]

Since our local swap meet had a mention in Linda's original story, I thought I would provide a visual reference. The sign has degenerated more, since Bob painted it, but the swap meet is still the place to go early on a Saturday morning, if you are looking for collectibles, books, clothes, horse bridles, tools, or ???.