Families Keep Busy With Everyday Life : Armed forces: Relatives of service personnel keep up their spirits by concentrating on the daily routines.

Carol and R.T. Flowers took a Greyhound from Meeker, Okla., (pop. 1,140) to San Pedro to see how their daughter, Terri, and her two children were doing now that Terri’s husband was stuck on a Navy ship in the Persian Gulf.

They found that life, good and bad, is settling down to normal.

Ali, 4, started kindergarten this month at Eshelman Elementary School in Lomita. For the first time, a boy tried to kiss her.

Annie, 7, lost another tooth. Last week she won a pass to Knott’s Berry Farm for her school work.

The girls don’t worry as much about their father, Howard Morris, a petty officer first class aboard the Antietam, a guided missile cruiser. He had shipped out of Long Beach Naval Station June 20 on a routine tour of duty in the Indian Ocean. Within a week after Iraq invaded Kuwait, however, his cruiser was deployed to the Persian Gulf with two other warships from Long Beach.

“At least he’s not going to die,” Annie says now.

‘The news reports make it seem like all the military families are falling apart while our spouses are gone,” Terri said, sitting in a lawn chair, shivering as the sun went down. “But we are continuing with our lives.” Hers includes fighting her own battle with multiple sclerosis.

Most folks back in Meeker--most noted as the birthplace of New York Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell--don’t pay much attention to the crisis in the Gulf, said Carol and R.T., keeping an eye on the girls, who were playing with other children from the complex of Navy housing.

In Meeker they grumble about the price of gas for their tractors and cars at the filling station, but the invasion rarely comes up during talk over coffee and doughnuts at the cafe. It is just too far away from their farming community.

“I don’t understand what the purpose is to start with,” said R.T., a quiet man, staring at his feet. “It’s oil, it’s greed. That’s what it boils down to. Greed.” He nodded his head.

Vietnam was different. Plenty of local boys went over, including Terri’s older brother, Lynn, in 1968.

“He came home,” Carol said. One local boy didn’t.

The Meeker News is full of reports about county fairs and school sports, recipes, and birth and death announcements. The front-page editorials, called Jelly Sez after Jelly Clark, the 95-year-old former town mayor who writes them, have dealt with memories of the town’s old streetcars and Labor Day parades. Terri mails the paper to Howard. “The guys on the ship get a big kick out of it,” she said.

In return, Howard, a former star football player for Meeker High School, sends the former Lincoln County, Okla., Dairy Princess Pageant’s Miss Congeniality love poems:

There are rhymes and a word for every emotion ... I love you, even from the middle of this damned ocean.

A few houses up the street, Betty Taylor says she has been so busy she sometimes almost forgets that her husband is away on the Prairie. Terry Taylor is a petty officer first class aboard the repair and supply vessel, which is on standby in the West Pacific.

Betty is helping to coordinate the ship’s homecoming in December. The navy spouses are making a 110-foot-long lei for when the ship returns. She has to get scores of sawhorses for the ship’s pier, and 10 crates of mistletoe shipped from Texas to decorate the sawhorses. Plus she needs doughnuts and drinks on hand. And, of course, a good Santa to welcome the ship home.

“It’s almost over with,” Betty said.

Her nightmares about her husband being involved in a disaster at sea have ended, Betty said. Now she’s dreaming about his homecoming--”But it’s not fun! I keep dreaming about what details I’m forgetting!”

“Hi, mom,” said Melisa Kennedy, 12. She was talking to a tape machine in her family’s San Pedro living room.

Last week the Kennedy family sent a letter on cassette to mom--also known as Dorothy Gale Kennedy, chief petty officer aboard the Prairie. The Prairie is now in Japan, where it has been put on standby in case anything flares up in the Gulf.

“How’re you doing?” Melisa asked, wiggling her toes in the family cat’s fur. “So far I’ve gotten three A’s. And, well, the other day we saw a crash on the way to Smile Care. I got my bottom wires on my teeth. School is fun. One time, we had to do 30 jumping jacks until we got it right.”

Their dad, Steve, picked up the machine. He hesitated. “Tell her Calico is eating Patrick’s foot right now!” Melisa suggested.

Steve clicked off the machine and glared at his son. “How long have you been wearing those socks?” he scolded in jest. “No wonder the cats like them, they have every smell in the world!”

The Kennedy family has adjusted to life without their mother. Steve has become adept at the laundry and balancing odd jobs and dinner. The kids are getting their chores and schoolwork done. About the worst thing that has happened to them this month is that their pet Minnie Mouse died.

Approaching the end of his first month back on active duty, Dr. Jon Greif, 45, lives in the Bachelor Officers Quarters at the Charleston Naval Base in what could charitably be called a “hotel-style” room.

“It’s a bit spartan,” Greif says.

His wife, Kate, a CPA in San Diego who remained home when he was called up, is trying to pool her income with her husband’s Navy paycheck to stay current on mortgage payments and keep their 5-year-old son, Ian, in a private school.

It’s a task that gets harder every day.

Dr. Greif, a general surgeon at Kaiser Permanente since 1986, arrived in South Carolina on Aug. 29. His reserve unit had been ordered to staff the San Diego Naval Hospital, but Greif--Cmdr. Greif in the U.S. Navy--was tapped to fill a vacancy in Charleston, S.C.

He has found he’s not alone.

With him are other physicians--military regulations prohibit him from saying how many--plucked out of their communities to fill in for Navy doctors ordered elsewhere since the U.S. decision to send troops to Saudi Arabia.

“We’ve developed an esprit de corps ,” Greif said. “We’re making the best of it.”

“For the most part we are holding up. Our families are holding up well.”

He and his wife recently celebrated their 15th anniversary, apart. It would have cost too much for Greif to fly home.

“It’s really a question of can we afford it. If I can find a good enough fare and we can be sure we have enough money to pay all the bills, we will take a few days off,” he said.

Before the call-ups, the family was talking of moving into a bigger house. Now, Greif says, “we’ll be very grateful to stay in the one we’re in.”

Greif says his financial situation is “relatively good” compared to other reservist physicians there, but he has lost more than 75% of his monthly income with the activation.

“It’s the one big worry we have,” he said. “Every night we sit and joke about it, but it’s not very funny at all.”

Back in San Pedro, Howard Morris’ mother, Gayle, flew in from Meeker to join her in-laws and help Terri.

She doesn’t write her son many letters.

“I’ve done my share,” Gayle said, alluding to the correspondence she sent Howard’s father--”a loudmouth drill instructor,” she calls him-- when he was in the Marines. The day Howard started kindergarten, his father was in Vietnam.

When Howard told her he was going to the Gulf last month, his mother didn’t have much reaction. “Take care of yourself,” she said, and then hung up the phone and went back to cooking fried potatoes and eggs for her husband’s breakfast.

But when Gayle smoked a cigarette the other night, talking about Howard, her hand trembled. “I’d be a nervous wreck if I thought about it,” she said.

“I have good examples to follow,” Terri said.

Terri was also referring to her own mother, who years ago followed R.T. from Great Bend, Kan., to West Bend, Wis., as he laid pipe. It was a life a lot like in the military, Carol said, full of packing boxes and unfriendly neighbors and loneliness. They finally settled on a dairy farm in Meeker.

When Terri was born, R.T. made Carol a promise: “Mammie, she’s going to have all the pretty clothes she wants.”

Her parents said they spoiled Terri so much she often got out of milking the cows, and once her grandfather even let her wear her grandmother’s girdle to church.

Now Carol and R.T. feel helpless. Loving won’t cure Terri’s illness or solve the crisis overseas or bring Howard back.

So they did all they could this month during their visit. They played and read with the girls. The women cooked dinners and cleaned the garage. R.T. laid a new carpet in the living room.

A couple of times at night they sang hymns around the piano.

“I paid $1,000 for that piano and I haven’t got 10 cents worth yet,” R.T. grumbled in jest when Terri said she didn’t feel well enough. Sometimes her muscle spasms get so bad she can’t play.

On Sept. 26, the Flowers boarded a bus home to Meeker.

Terri and the girls cried a little when they left. But her family will be fine, Terri said. They’re used to saying goodby.