I started work at the Dow Center in Houston in September of 1981 as a project estimator. We estimated the cost of new chemical plants and power plants for the Dow Chemical Company all over the world. It was interesting work and stressful. I went from a full head of hair to almost bald in about six years.
In 1982, Dow had just finished their best year ever. We had close to two thousand employees at the Dow Center and in two other high‑rises down the street. Things were good, and my boys would come to visit in the summer. I had made two trips to see them in Illinois. On one of those trips, we drove over to Indiana to see my sister Wanda and her husband Don.
I met my second wife at the Dow Center. Her name was Tina Edge, and she was the branch manager for the Dow Employees Credit Union there. We dated for several months, and in the summer of 1984, we were married in my brother’s backyard in Lake Jackson, Texas. I was leasing a patio home in Houston at the time, so we lived there for a few months before buying a home in Katy, Texas. Interest rates were over eleven percent. Jimmy Carter was president, and the country was without proper management.
My sons visited during the summer, and those visits were my lifeline to them.
During our first year of marriage, after attending several different churches on Sundays for many weeks, a Plain Truth Magazine appeared in our mailbox without a mailing label. We had agreed that we needed spiritual guidance in our marriage, but what that magazine represented was not something Tina would accept. I had grown up in a very small Protestant Church of Christ, and my wife had grown up in the Pentecostal religion. The Plain Truth Magazine represented a seventh‑day Sabbath understanding.
I began studying and ordering the booklets the magazine offered, checking everything against my Bible to see if it was true, and found that it was. God commands a seventh‑day Sabbath, along with the Holy Days laid out in the Old Testament and continued in the New Testament.
In the summer of 1986, while we lived in Katy, my boys were with us again. When it came time for them to go back to Illinois, Ben, my oldest, was about fourteen and getting ready to start his freshman year in high school. He told me he didn’t want to go back to Illinois. Bryan, who was eleven, wanted to return.
I checked with my attorney, and he told me that in Texas, at fourteen, a child could decide which parent they wanted to live with. That was not the case in Illinois. I called Cece gave her the news and told her to be sure to meet the plane because Bryan would be flying back by himself. That phone call started World War III.