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But these bouts with alcohol weren't all. There were bouts also with loneliness which drove a couple of the boys into the arms of some local girls. The boys were married but the girls were led to believe they were single. Let's call one of the men John. John led his girl along to the point where she had fallen in love with him and made it very clear that she wanted him to marry her. This affair had progressed for months before getting to this point. John didn't know how to untangle himself from the situation. He decided he didn't have the guts to tell her the truth so he sought shelter in trying to drop completely out of her life by refusing to see her or even talk to her on the phone. He then received a barrage of impassioned letters pleading with him to see her again, wondering what had gone wrong, what she'd done to make him act this way. John didn't know what to do. The girl had meant nothing to him except as someone to relieve his loneliness. If she had understood that at the start as well as his married status, and had still wanted to go with him, it wouldn't have been so bad. As it was, however, it was very unfair to her---perhaps more so to her than to his family. I don't know why these people seemed to want to confide in me but this happened occasionally. In this case, John got me aside one day and told me that he'd finally taken the girl out the previous night, had told her the truth about himself, and that she'd taken it smiling with the tears rolling down her cheeks. And all was now well again. He said that both he and she felt 100% better and she'd told him she saw no reason why they should cease seeing each other completely. So he felt that his problem was now straightened out.

And there was another "affair." This one involved, let us say "Joe." Joe too was lonely. So Joe took up with a girl who had been dropped some time before by two of the other men, why I don't know. The diary is very vague on this and may be trying to suggest that she was a professional. At any rate, Joe became so infatuated with her, and very quickly, that he wanted to divorce his wife and marry this woman. This was only a few days after Joe, in discussing the ethics of going out with women, had declared there was nobody else in the world who meant anything to him but his wife. But when he got with this girl, he was carried away almost instantly. It had occurred the night before and he'd been on such a spree that he had to return to the hotel at noon and go to bed after spending the morning in the office while the rest of us were at Bldg. 60. The following day, Jack Walker showed up and the other boys told him about this situation. Jack promptly transferred Joe to another inspection location without Joe knowing the true reason. Jack simply told him it had to be done for "business reasons." I guess that all my life I'd been sheltered from this sort of thing and to suddenly run into it so close at hand made it seem all the more sordid to me. I didn't like it but I did get involved, nevertheless, in one of the boy's shenanigans

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