Tom had a few double dates with Barbara Price in 1944 when he was in training at Mather AAF near Sacramento, California.
We really had a swell weekend. Mort’s girl and my date from Berkeley got to Sacramento about 5:00 Sat. afternoon. We didn’t fly Sat. afternoon so we got to meet them. To top things off we rented a car for the weekend (set us back $20.00). Came out here and had dinner in the officer’s mess and went to the dance at the officers’ club in the evening. We were lucky enough to have been able to get them a room the Wed. before. Went in and got them Sun. and came back out here and swam till about 3:00 PM. Took the train back to Berkeley at 5:00. When we got back there Mort’s girl friends folks had us all up to dinner. (A picnic lunch in the back yard, they really had a nice place for it). Stayed all night at Mort’s and got back to the base about noon Mon. just in time to make class at 1:00. The girl I had the date with was the same one that Mort’s mother had gotten a date with me for the weekend before. Her name is Barbara Price. She went to the girls school at Rockford, Ill. last year and the year before. Her Father use to be director of the International House in Chicago. She was born in China and lived there for the first 7 years. I didn’t know it till Mort told me and then about passed out. She is blonde and about 5’5″, cute. Mort and I are suppose to get to Berkeley Fri. night for dates, probably end up getting to Lemoore late.
Barbara was born in Fuzhou, Fujian, China, in 1924 and lived the first 7 years of her life in China. She left Shanghai with her family in 1930, traveling ultimately to Chicago.
Barabara’s father, Ernest Batson Price, was a career diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. Extract from Wikipedia:
Ernest Batson Price (October 13, 1890 – October 20, 1973) was an American diplomat, university professor, military officer, and businessman. He spent over twenty years in China and witnessed first-hand warlord power struggles, the growth of Japanese militarism, America’s post-war diplomacy, China’s civil war, and the profound social change that followed. As a result of this first-hand experience, Price was one of America’s foremost authorities on Chinese language, culture, and politics from the early nineteen twenties through the mid nineteen fifties.
After the war, she married Richard Earl Runyan in Hong Kong in 1947. He worked for a large oil company in Viet Nam, and there she had two daughters. She later married Kenneth Welch Carpenter in 1959, in Monterey, California. She died on August 30, 1986, at the age of 62.