Soon I’ll be back in Hamilton, Missouri, where I grew up. If you’ve read WITH LOVE, WHEREVER YOU ARE, you know that Frank (my dad) grew up in Hamilton too. After WW2 ended, Frank and Helen (my mom) had big plans to set up a practice out East. They liked the Washington D.C. area and Arlington, where they were finishing their stint as Army doctor and Army nurse. Frank dreamed of starting his own practice in Florida, close to a beach and good tennis courts. Helen wasn’t a fan of the heat, but she wanted to live in a big city.
They ended up in Hamilton, Missouri, a small town with no beach, no tennis court, and no city, unless you drove an hour south to Kansas City. Dr. Frank Daley took over the practice of his dad, Dr. Daley, “temporarily,” when Pete had a heart attack. Helen and Frank never left. They built their first house–that’s it in the bottom left picture, with the oil drum in view. A few years later, they’d saved enough money to build onto the house. I think you can figure out the stages in the pictures from over the years, as they saved, then added on. My husband, Joe, and I adopted the same policy and only built onto our house when we’d saved the money to do it. I guess this is only one of the many things learned in Hamilton.
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