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10 SOUTHERN SENIOR MAGAZINE | Fall 2022 Chevy Impala came open and Chris went flying out onto the street.” She took him to the hospital on the base at Blytheville and he was fine. The next few days Chris began to run a fever and she was worried he was having a problem from the impact on the street, but it turns out he had the chicken pox. Mary Jayne began to think she and the boys may not be alive when Ed gets back. She knew she had to make it through Ed’s absence. Ed spent one year in Vietnam working as a photo inter- preter with the 16th Technical Reconnaissance Squadron deriving intelligence from RF-4 and RF-101 reconn air- craft. All of this work was done manually because, as Ed noted, this was way before ArcGis and other sophisti- cated computer-based system that came along later. “Our job was to use intelligence data and figure out where Charlie (Viet Cong) was and provide the fighter pilots mis- sions for their flights.,” Ed explained. This was a tough time for Mary Jayne back at home hop- ing and praying Ed would make it back home safe. They communicated mainly by sending audio tapes back and forth through the mail. Ed was able to talk with her via short wave radio on about four occasions, but that was difficult because they had to communicate through a third person who repeated what was said back and forth. “The thing that got us through that time was prayer. Lots of prayer,” Mary Jayne shared. After his tour was up, Ed was sent to Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. At Langley, Ed continued to work with map creation and now was working on creating layers of topographical maps. After 11 months at Langley, Ed was looking to get out, but was called up to go to Laos as part of the Vietnam War effort, and this had included another bonus. Ed had extended his time with the Air Force, and had not re-enlisted, so when the orders came, he did two things. One, he put the bonus aside for he did not plan on taking it for he was determined to leave the Air Force. The second action was to see the Command- ing Officer (CO) to tell the CO that the orders was a mis- take. The CO told Ed that “when you sign on that dotted line, you will do what the military tells you to do.” Ed asked the CO to get the paperwork and read it be- cause it was not what the CO had thought. Sure enough, the CO soon realized Ed had actually extended instead of re-enlisting. Ed went the next day and gave the bonus money back. Ed still had about three months left in the Air Force. One day he saw a letter on a bulletin board that said Lockheed Electronics was looking for photo interpreters at the Mis- sissippi Test Facility. He sent them a resume, got an in- terview, and they soon offered Ed a job with a starting pay of $3.75 per hour, which was 50 cents more than Lockheed was normally paying for that role at the time. So they loaded up and came to Picayune and stayed at the Apollo Inn while they were looking for a home. Mary Jayne said the biggest eye opener was the artesian water smell she encountered on their exposure to Mississippi. They found a house in the Ponderosa subdivision with a monthly note of $105.00 per month, and they weren’t sure how they were going to make it happen. Mary Jayne took up taking care of other people’s children in the neighbor- hood. Ed said “She did that to make sure we had groceries”. After three years, they moved to Las Vegas, NV, in 1974 to be a part of a new Remote Sensing team for the EPA for the entire United States. In 1977, Al Pressman, who had started the team in Las Vegas, came back to work for the Naval Ocean Research and Development Activity (NORDA) at NSTL and called Ed to come back there to work with him. Ed, Mary Jayne, and the boys came back to Picayune in February of 1977 and have been here since that time. The jour- ney was a long one, but a few things made it work. “We pray together nightly. We love each other,” Ed said. “Other than the short time when I moved back to Blytheville, while Ed was in Vietnam, we have never been around family. We only had each other for most of our marriage to depend on, and God got us through it all,” Mary Jayne said. “Do as much as you can to help them (spouse). Be a good teammate,” Mary Jayne added. “There are ups and downs in marriage. Work to make sure there are more ups. Also, be open to ideas other than your own,” Ed shared. “We’ve been married for 56 years and we have kept Christ in our life. We worship to- gether, and like Mary Jayne said, we have began a good team.”