CHM's life between 1960 and 1985

I am not at all sure when it was that CHM took possession of the apartment where he had grown up. It must have been in the 1960s. I remember that he told me he had had his parents' apartment divided into two smaller apartments by having an interior wall built. He sold one half of the apartment and kept the other half for himself. The half that he kept had been his father's medical office. He had bathroom fixtures put in and I guess he had the kitchen fitted too. Then he decided to move to the U.S. in 1969. I think he had been there only once before, in 1948.

He settled in Washington DC because he had French friends there. One of them had a house in the village called Carteret in Normandy that I had visited. He stayed with them for a while, I think, and then he met his friend/partner Frank and moved in with him. Some years later Frank moved to southern California (for health reasons). Other members of his family were living out there. CHM bought Frank's house in Arlington VA from him at that point.

During all that time, CHM let people live in his Paris apartment rent-free, if I remember correctly and if he was telling me the truth. Sometimes he didn't tell the truth about such things, I've learned. He didn't like to be asked what he called personal questions. The Paris apartment was getting run down because the people who lived there for free didn't maintain the place, and they certainly didn't improve it.

In fact, the first couple who lived there for a few years did a lot of damage to the place, CHM said. CHM returned to Paris for a visit in 1979 for the first time since he had moved to the U.S. in 1969, he told me, and asked that couple to move out. I met CHM in 1982, when I returned to the U.S. after three years of living in Paris. I applied for a job as a translator at USIA and he was one of the people who evaluated the translation that was part of the test. He called me and offered me a job.

 I went to work with  him in January 1983. We produced the French version of a magazine that was distributed in French-speaking Africa. Because the magazine was consistently weeks and then months behind schedule. CHM was a perfectionist who had a hard time signing off on the final versions of the articles we were editing. He always wanted to make more changes to the text.

Because he kept telling the managers of the government agency who were in charge that the reason he couldn't stay on schedule was because he couldn't find good English-to-French translators in DC, they made the decision to transfer the work to the U.S. embassy in Paris. I quickly found a position as a writer and editor in another department of the organization we worked for. CHM was eventually transferred to that service as well, but he was no longer my supervisor. In 1986, Walt and I  quit our jobs in DC moved to California, for various reasons.

To be continued...