Career
Batt enlisted in the service on his 17th birthday in 1944; with a brother-in-law killed at Guadalcanal (and a brother who later lost an arm at Okinawa), he aimed to be a fighter pilot to avenge the damage to his family.
Still not eighteen, he briefly attended the University of Idaho in Moscow in north Idaho, then entered the Army Air Forces in 1945 and was in basic training during V-J Day.
With the war over, fighter pilots were not needed so Batt served sixteen months at Lowry Field in Denver as a clerk, discharging veterans before being discharged himself. He then returned to the UI and studied chemical engineering, lived in the dorms, and led a dance band, playing clarinet and tenor saxophone.
A year later in January 1948, he eloped with Jacque Fallis of Spokane, a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority. The newlyweds had to leave school a month later when Batt's 66 year-old father was involved in a serious automobile accident which left him with limited strength and speech. Though the young Batts initially hoped to return to college, economic circumstances changed their plans and they reluctantly did not.
Read more about this topic: Phil Batt
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)