Falls Church, Virginia (1945 to 1955)

Our family left Chile and returned to Virginia in June 1945, when the war in Europe had ended and Sandra was six months old.

We lived in Falls Church from June 1945 to October 1955, when we moved to Havana Cuba. In Falls Church, our family lived with our father’s parents, George and Sarah Lavinia (Vinnie) Price. Our grandfather, George Buckner Price, had recently retired from his position as Deputy Director of the Rail Mail Service of the U.S. Post Office and he and Nana had moved from Bethesda Maryland, where our father had grown up, and where my parents had lived before moving to Chile, to their house at 2315 North Tuckahoe Street in Falls Church.

Below is a photo of our grandparents, George and Vinnie Price.

Sandra was still an infant when our family returned to Virginia. Our mother is holding her in the photo below, standing with Bill and Pat and our cousin (our father’s brother Fred’s son), Barry Hunt Price.

The photo below shows Sandra in the Fall of 1945 in Falls Church, when Sandra was almost a year old.

In the Summer of 1946, the family took vacations to Bethany Beach in Delaware. The photos below show Sandra with Bill and Pat at Bethany Beach, and with our mom.

In the fall and winter of 1946-47, our family was in Falls Church. The photos below show Sandra during those seasons.

The photos below show Sandra with our mom and with Pat and Bill.

Below is a photo of Pat and Sandra on May 14, 1948. in Falls Church.

The photo below is of Sandra in July 1948.

And with Mom and Dad and Pat and David, developed on July 26, 1949.

In January 1950, when Sandra turned 5 years old, she began attending grade 1 at Stuart Elementary School in Falls Church. In Arlington County, if students were born before February 1st, they could begin grade 1 in January of their fifth year, and provided they were able to cope with work in the first two weeks of the fall semester, they could then proceed to grade 2, which Sandra did.

The photo below was in October 1949, with Mom, Grampa Burr, and David.

The photo below is of Sandra in the Autumn of 1950, alone, and with Pat, Bill, and David.

Thirty-five years later, in the fall of 1985, Sandra would write a paper for Professor Manuel Fimbres for her Master of Social work program at San Jose State University, entitled, “My Life: A Work in Progress & Genogram”. In it, she wrote:

I have many pleasant memories of this early period of my life- playing blocks with my younger brother, cutting pictures out of National Geographic and pasting them onto pieces of cardboard to make books, sledding down the hill in front of our house in winter, going Trick or Treating, opening Christmas presents, sharing Thanksgiving with relatives, and searching for Easter Eggs on Easter morning…We all coped differently with the tensions that existed in this multi-generational household. My older sister, Patricia, became an achiever, doing well in school, becoming a cheerleader, joining a high school sorority, taking ballet lessons, etc. As an adolescent, she monopolized the only bathroom, locked the door of the bedroom she and I shared, and became known in the family as “the boarder,” because of her disengagement from the family. This was her way of achieving privacy in a space that always felt crowded to her.

My older brother came into constant conflict with my father and grandfather who were relentless in their insistence that he not be “soft.” As a boy, he was slightly overweight and therefore targeted by the neighborhood bully who regularly waylaid him on his walk to school. He got Rheumatic fever when he was a young boy and my mother spent a great deal of time caring for him. They were always close and I felt that my father occasionally resented the attention my mother focused on Bill. I think my father had a certain expectation of how his firstborn son should be, and Bill didn’t quite meet that expectation, and I also think the conflict that existed between them was partly a reenactment of the earlier conflict my father experienced with his own father growing up. Later, when Bill went from ugly duckling to swan and became the family “hero”, the emotional distance between him and my father remained.

My refuge was nature. In Wegscheider’s model, I was the “lost child” (Carter & McGoldrick, p. 496). I escaped out into the yard or into the woods behind our house and there, with my best friend, engaged in endless fantasies of cowboys and Indians, wild horses, and other products of that American dream machine —TV. I can still recapture the peace and joy I felt as I played in the woods and fields. During this early period of my life, my maternal grandmother experienced severe depression and received electro-convulsive shock therapy.

Sandra’s best friend in Falls Church was Mitzi Johnson, the younger sister of Bill’s friend, Robbie Johnson. Below is a photo of Sandra and Mitzi, taken in April 1952.

The photos below were taken in Falls Church, in April 1952, showing Sandra, 7, with David, then 4, and Pat, who was 13.

Below is a photo of our family in Falls Church in 1953, when Sandra was 8.

In the fall of 1953, when Sandra was beginning grade 5, Tuckahoe Elementary School opened at 6550 N. 26th Street in Falls Church. It was a short walk through the woods known as Crossman’s Farm from our home at 2315 North Tuckahoe Street to the school. Its first class was enrolled for the September 1953 to Spring 1954 year, when third and fourth graders stayed at the old Stewart school while kindergartners, 1st, 2nd, 5th and 6th graders, including Sandra in 5th grade and David in 1st grade, attended Tuckahoe.

Below is a photo of Sandra with David and our cousin, Donny Donaldson (the son of our mother Joan’s half-sister, Ruth and her husband Grant Donaldson, in Falls Church in the Autumn of 1954.

In 1954 to 55, Sandra attended grade 6 at Tuckahoe Elementary School. David was in grade 2. When we moved to Cuba on October 20, 1955, we had lived in Falls Church for ten years.

At the time of our departure from Falls Church, Sandra had just begun grade 7 and David had just begun grade 3. Although three years older than David, Sandra was four years ahead in school, owing to the fact that she had moved ahead to 2ndgrade in the fall of 1950, when she was still 5.

Our parents discovered that the schools in Havana were more advanced than those in Falls Church. They enrolled Pat and Bill at Ruston Academy, but because Ruston had just moved from downtown Havana to a new location in the Country Club suburb northwest of the City, it was enrolling students beginning at the higher grades, and did not yet have space ready for full enrollment in the lower grades. Because of this limitation, our parents enrolled Sandra and David at another school, Lafayette Academy, where Sandra was moved back a year to grade 6 and David was moved back to grade 2, until they could catch up to the curriculum at their new schools..

Below is Sandra’s passport photos when our family moved to Havana.