Arden was my father's name. He did not have a middle name. His parents were Walter Hetherington Packard and Elizabeth Jane Reynolds. He was born in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, 29 April 1911.
His name was a bit of a bone of contention and lapse of attention. His father wanted to name him Walter Hetherington Packard, Jr., according to my aunt. Elizabeth Jane nixed that, saying that two Walter Hetherington Packards would be too many. Undecided about what permanent name to hang on him, my grandfather put Arden on the birth certificate, with no middle name. And apparently grandpa and grandma Packard could not agree on a name, and left it at Arden.
I have no idea how my father felt about being named for a dairy. Walter Packard was the supervisor at the Arden Dairy in Los Angeles.
My father's interest in flying began fairly early. In high school, he was a member of the Aero Club, an organization for boys who were fascinated by the relatively new phenomenon of flying. My father kept that fascination. He enlisted in the Navy out of high school, and was sent for training at the San Diego Naval Base. That was in 1930, and in that year's census, he was counted both at the family home in Pasadena, where he wasn't, and at the San Diego Naval Base, where he was.
While an enlisted man, he took the competetive examination for admission into the Naval Academy. He won entrance, and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934. After getting initial experience as an officer under his belt, he applied and was accepted for flight training at Pensacola Naval Base in Florida. There was a family there named Reed, and their younger daughter, Martha, met Arden there, and they were married in 1937.
They never owned a home while my father was alive. Not even after he got out of the Navy after World War II. They always rented, which gave me dyspepsia tryng to find them in property records. From Pensacola, Arden and Martha set out for his first duty station as a Naval aviator -- Norfolk, Virginia. They started their family fairly early, and while he was out on an aircraft carrier in August of 1938, mom was back in Pensacola to obtain her mother's help for the birth of their first child, Mary Elizabeth.
The Navy sent my dad back to California for a while. I remember reading in his service record that he had kept that he was a technical adviser on some training films made in Hollywood. That record got lost when an individual who shall always be accorded my opprobrium selfishly destroyed it and several other precious keepsakes when she wanted our storage space at the house she and my mom and I both shared with another woman. All she had to do was ask; there was plenty of room for the items in my closet. All three adults were employees of a local hospital, and I was in high school.
After Norfolk, the Packard Family migrated to Florida, to Miami, where he was assigned to the Naval air base there. That's where my brother, Arden Packard II, was born in 1942. I guess my mother thought two Arden Packards in the world was not such a bad thing.
After Miami, dad was sent to Jacksonville Naval Air Station, also in Florida. My mom once pointed out to me the house where they lived in the Riverside - Avondale area of Jacksonville. They also lived a while at Jacksonville Beach. My dad was not one to stay in place long.
After World War II, they stayed in Jacksonville a brief while, then it was back to California, where I was born in 1947. We stayed there a few years, which I do not remember, and when I was about three or four, we went back to Jacksonville. From there, we went to Pensacola, where dad had an offer of a job based on his degree in Engineering from Annapolis. And from there, we went back to California, and were living in Tarzana when he died in 1954.
There was one final migration, when my widowed mother took my sister and my brother and me back to Florida. We were accompanied by our teenage cousin Rosanna, who wanted to visit the Reed relatives in Jacksonville. That was where my mother lived in the first house that she lived in that wasn't rented. She bought a house around the corner from her mother and sister.
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