one that our school bus passed by on its morning route. Lynn and I sat quietly every day and never told the kids on the bus for fear of being teased.
Meanwhile, as Frank and Uncle Bill became closer friends, our family life became increasingly entwined with the Gale’s. In 1949, Frank and Bill bought matching black Lincolns. We went on weekend ski trips all over New England, and every year on the day after Christmas, we all went to Stowe, Vermont, and spent a week skiing at Mt. Mansfield and Spruce Peak, while staying at a little country guest house.
Uncle Bill owned a summer cottage on Lake Oscaleta in South Salem, NY. At first, we went up for occasional visits, but soon started renting other cottages for the summer. Eventually, in 1951, we bought our own cottage three houses down from Uncle Bill’s. My sisters and I loved it there. There were plenty of other kids to play with, and we could swim, boat, and fish all summer right at our own little beach and dock. Dad and Uncle Bill each bought a small sail boat and spent their days off racing each other up and down the lake.
Every spring when school ended, we packed up and moved to the cottage, returning to Greenwich the following fall. But Frank commuted from the cottage to his Greenwich studio every day, a distance of about 30 miles.
He liked South Salem so much that, in 1957, he bought five acres on the hill behind, and contiguous with, our cottage property. He hired an architect and, two years later, built a large modern house. We said ‘goodbye’ to our Greenwich home, moved into the new house, and started attending the local schools. But every spring as usual, we packed up and moved to the cottage, a mere hundred yards down the hill.
The architect designed the house with Frank’s studio downstairs with a large picture-window looking out at the surrounding forest. During the summers, dad commuted by simply walking up the hill in the morning and back down at dinnertime.
During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Frank’s business flourished. One of his best clients was the General Drafting Co. in Convent Station, NJ. Standard Oil Co., at that time, offered free road maps to motorists that stopped at their service stations. The cover of each map had an illustration of some tourist destination located in the city or state that the map represented. These maps were made by General Drafting, who commissioned Frank to illustrate the map covers, which he did for 15 years.
General Drafting had its studios in a large stone castle, an actual replica of a castle in England, complete with suits of armor and a dungeon. The dungeon was at the bottom of a narrow stone stairway accessed through a secret hidden doorway. The staff used the dungeon as a lunch room and had decorated the walls with Frank’s map covers.
