9th HOME - Marriotts Cove, NS

Not home for long, just a summer cottage on Marriotts Cove.  But a wonderful place to be in the warm days of July and August in Nova Scotia. Marriott's Cove is a community on a cove off of the Atlantic Ocean, just west of the Village of Chester in Lunenburg County.

Lucy and Curtis in the rowboat in front of the cottage on Marriotts Cove.

8th HOME–Cottage on Shaw Island, NS

Shaw Island in August is a wonderful retreat just west of Halifax on the South Shore. With protected back bays and beautiful vistas, a summer on Shaw Island is filled with fresh fish, picking berries, and time on the water. We don’t have a picture of the cottage but in the above photo is a photo of the boat dock which is just a few feet from the cottage.  The Gaff-rigged Schooner on the right of the photo was ours and a closer photo of the schooner appears below.

Shaw Island is located on Chester Basin. Great for sailing, fishing, and shopping. One interesting historical fact is located on Oak Island in the bottom of the map below. Oak Island is the site of the world’s longest running hunt for lost treasure. No one is sure exactly but various theories suggest that a Pirate, or the Knights Templar, or Francis Bacon created a mysterious Money Pit on the island, protected by a series of ingenious traps that would flood the tunnels, flooding the shafts with sea water to protect from treasure hunters. For hundreds of years treasure hunters have tried to recover the treasure, without success. But during the summer of 2011 the hunt in on again.

7th HOME – Eastern Shore, Nova Scotia

An institution for residents of Nova Scotia is the “Summer Cottage”. During the years 1969 – 1971 when we first lived there, everyone had a cottage during 6 weeks in the summer and occasionally throughout the year families spend a holiday or weekend at their cottage. Cottages ran the gambit from small and inexpensive to large and lavish.  In our case our cottage was rented, small, inexpensive and we all enjoyed it.

The Eastern Shore is a little developed area running along the Atlantic Coast east from Halifax. With many inlets and bays, there were many cottages right on the sea. 

One of the treats of a cottage in this area was the opportunity to buy fresh lobster from the fishermen as they returned to shore each day.  In 1969 we were buying lobster from them for $0.75/lb. and cooking them in sea water over a wood fired kitchen stove.

The Easter Shore of Nova Scotia

6th HOME - 1941 WOODLAWN TERRACE, HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA

The Glen Novinger Family arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1969 after 2 years living in Managua, Nicaragua. The change from Managua to Halifax was from a tropical climate to a northern Atlantic chilly to cold temperate climate and from a Latin American Spanish culture to an Anglo/British based English culture. But I would not want to neglect the opportunity to say that we loved the life of the Maritime Provinces of Canada and Nova Scotia in particular; and we end up spending several years living in Halifax.

In 1969 I was sent to Nova Scotia by the International Division of Citibank as Senior Regional Officer of the Mercantile Bank of Canada. In this position I had responsibility for the banking operations in the four Maritime Provinces of the Mercantile Bank, a Canadian Chartered Bank with its head office in Montreal. My office was in the Halifax Branch of the Bank at One Sackville Street and Water Street. From my office I could look across Water Street to the wharves and the harbour and watch the workers each morning bring out the drying racks filled with cod fish to dry in the sun and air.

Upon arrival in Halifax we purchased a home at 1941 Woodlawn Terrace, above the Northwest Arm of the ocean, where we lived from 1969 to 1971. From the second floor bedrooms one could see the NW Arm and the sail boats moored on the Arm at the Yacht Club. Our Woodlawn Terrace house was built at the turn of the century by ships wrights who were unemployed as a consequence of the end of the great schooner ship period in the last of the 19th Century. The house had fine hand fitted oak moldings, doors, window seats, and stairway. The garden was a main feature of the house with a large rock garden flowing down from the house to the street. It was a wonderful home at the end of a "U" shaped street.

5th HOME – Las Colinas, Managua, Nicaragua

Upon arriving in Managua, Nicaragua, in September of 1967, we spent the first 2 months in a suite at the Grand Hotel on Avenida Roosevelt, across from the Managua Cathedral. The Grand Hotel was a well known institution in the center of Managua for many decades, but it was destroyed by the 1972 earthquake that knocked down many of the buildings in central Managua. In November of 1967 we moved into a house that Citi Bank rented for us in the Las Colinas Development, 5 miles southeast of Managua on the highway to Masaya.

At Las Colinas our daughter, Lucy, ran barefoot through the garden and Curtis, who was born in Managua in 1968, learned to swim before he was 1 year old in the community pool next door.

4th HOME – Jumeirah Beach, Dubai, Trucial States

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LIFE ON JUMEIRAH BEACH

BEFORE THE DISCOVERY OF OIL

Location of Dubai

Dubai, Trucial States, was our home beginning on August 15, 1965. There were only 12 western style homes in the whole country, and all 12 were located on Jumeirah Beach, 1.5 miles south of center of Dubai, and right on the beach of the Arabian Gulf. The First National City Bank of New York, now Citibank, had rented 3 of the homes and we lived in this one, just steps from the water of the Gulf. For birthday parties, like the one above, the kids had camel rides up and down the beach.

Jumeirah Beach is now a different world after the discovery of oil in the Gulf in 1966. Jumeirah Beach is now the location of many grand buildings, residential developments, luxury hotels, and one of the largest, most beautiful mosques in the world, Jumeirah Mosque, which appears below.

But life was good before the discovery of oil. With only 85 non-Arabs living in the country, we socialized in each others homes on a daily basis like the gathering of friends below in our home.

 

And from time to time we had dinners at the house for employees of the First National City Bank as in the photo below.

We were assisted in the house in the British Foreign Service tradition by an Indian “Houseboy”, Abu, from Kerala State on the Malabar Coast of south-west India. Abu’s photo appears below.

Living in Dubai, Trucial States, in 1965- 1967 was to experience a period of the past in the recent present. Little had changed in Dubai during the previous 100’s of years.  All that began to change in 1966 when Continental Oil made the Dubai Pool Oil Discovery off the coast of Dubai in the Arabian Gulf. The Photo below is a testament to our life before the discovery of oil in Dubai.

Glen Novinger, Austin, Texas

3rd HOME - NOVINGER FARM, COLLINS, IOWA

It was a cold day, March 1, 1947, when we moved from Lucerne, Missouri, to the Novinger Farm, 2 miles south of Collins, Iowa, on Hwy 65. In fact it was a typical Iowa winter. There was so much snow that the trucks hauling the cattle and horses just backed up into a frozen snow drift and unloaded the farm animals onto the frozen snow!

Mom and Dad moved to Iowa specifically to buy more productive land, have a farm located on a paved road, and have access to a better school system for me and my sister, Dorothy Kay. It was a wise move, eventhough Dad's brothers thought he was crazy to pay $255 per acre when he could buy all the land he could ever use in Missouri for $75 per acre. Both states proved good for the "Novinger Boys" and 50 years later the $255 per acre looked like a bargain, as Iowa farm land was then worth $3000 to $4000 per acre.

The better schools in Iowa proved good for Dorothy Kay and me, as well as our brother, Jim, and sister, Jo Anne, who were soon born in Iowa. It was in Collins that I grew up from 2nd grade through high school. But the winters were cold and windy, with lots of snow and ice. Below is a picture of a mild and beautiful winter day.

2ND HOME: LUCERNE, MISSOURI

It was at our 2nd home that I remember being a small child from 1942 when I was 2 1/2 years old thru March of 1947, when I was 7 years old and in 2nd grade. Here I rode my tri-cycle and red wagon, both in this picture. This house and farm were located on a hill and I would coast down the hill on the dirt road with the tongue of the wagon in one hand and using the other hand to grab the back wheel of the waggon to stop it.

At this farm I learned to fish in the stock pond, and at 5 years of age began milking "my own milk cow", which Dad bought just so I had my own "chores"! I don't have a picture of the cow but here I am fishing at the pond with the house and barn in the distance.

Remembering back to this time, it seems like it must have been in an earlier century. Well I guess it was. We had no electricity, no running water, and the toilet was an outhouse. I started school at 5 years of age at the Jones School. The school was 2 miles from the farm on dirt (or mud, or snowy) roads. Dad and Mom bought a Shetland pony for me to ride to school and the week before school started Dad built a horse stall for the pony in the horse shed at school to separate it from the larger horses the older students rode to school. But that pony was a pest. To start with he was about 10 or 15 years older than I was! And devious! If I ever dropped the reins while opening or shutting a gate, the pony would take off at a trot or run all the way to school, leaving me in the dust to walk the 2 miles.

Well once you got to school, it was much like the farm house,. It was a one room building with no electricity, no running water, an outhouse outside, a well to pump drinking water, and a pot bellied stove in one corner for a limited amount of heat. But the teaching system was the most interesting. There were 8 grades in the school totaling 12 students but with only one teacher who stayed in one of the homes of the students parents each year. Since teaching each of the subjects for each of 8 different grades was over the top impossible. The teacher arranged the students desks in 4 rows from front to rear. In each row were the students for 2 grades: 1st & 2nd, 3rd & 4th, 5th &6th, and 7th and 8th. The teacher passed along in front of each row eaching a different subject and assigning work, and then passed to the next row doing the same. And so went each day and the whole year. Somehow it worked and the students learned their basic subjects. We then went home from school and did our homework at the kitchen table by kerosene lamp at night.

Below is my fine school pony with my surplus army amunition pack to cary my lunch and books.

FIRST HOME - WHERE I WAS BORN

Mom and Dad Novinger married and moved to the Johnson Farm, south of Gibbs, Missouri, in 1937. On August 10, 1939, their first child, Glen Novinger, was born in Mom and Dad's bedroom, upstairs at this home.

Frank Novinger & Glen Novinger (1940)

My earliest memories are of this house and the yard with a fence, within which I played until I was 2 years an 7 months old and we moved to Lucerne, Missouri.

Frank Novinger, holding Glen Novinger (1940)