The Phone Call

It took a lot of courage to finally pick up the phone and call Barney after twelve years.  When I finally did dial the number and hear his voice all I could say was "Hey".  When there was a pause that seemed like an eternity all the reasons why I had put off making the call flashed through my mind.  He didn't remember me, what nut says "hey" instead of hello this is.... or he simply did not want to hear from me.  Just as I was about to hang up and forget the whole thing I heard "Hey, yourself.  Where have you been for the last eleven years, seven months and six days?". Somehow I managed to mumble something about being in the process of moving to Kansas City.  He stopped me in the middle of my rambling and said he wanted to see me.  Could I meet him for lunch tomorrow? Without any hesitation I said yes and he gave me the name and address of a restaurant and then added he could not wait to see me.

Even though a sense of relief swept over me after the phone call there were some serious doubts about my having called him. The best thing to do was to stay busy for the next twenty-four hours so I made arrangements for a babysitter and took the boys to the zoo for the afternoon.  I did drive by the restaurant that afternoon so I could be sure to find it the next day.  When Dennis came back to the motel that evening I told him I was going to have lunch the next day with an old Stephens friend and he just said that was nice.

I surprised myself by not really being very nervous getting ready or driving to the restaurant. Barney had always been easy to talk to and of all of the people in my life I had been more open and honest with him than anyone else. There was perhaps a little apprehension when I walked into the restaurant and the maitre d' asked if he could be of service.  I told him I was meeting someone, he smiled and said "right this way". As we made our way through the restaurant I saw Barney stand as we approached the table. There was that same smile, that same lock of hair that fell across his eyes and he had not changed a bit.
He came around the table gave me a big hug, said how glad he was to see me.  When I asked him how the maitre d' knew I was meeting him he said he showed him a picture of me.  He pulled a slightly worn photograph out of his wallet taken back in the Stephens days.  Wow and I thought I was the only one that kept all that stuff.

It is difficult to explain the feeling that crept over me the moment I saw him.  There is a lot to be said for staying in touch with family and old friends.  Ever since I had married Dennis I actually spent very little time with my family and had not seen or heard from any of my childhood friends except Pam and Cathie.  There is something special about people you grew up with even if you weren't best friends.  For some reason it always seems like you just saw them yesterday. The years, the disappointments and the bad times seem to just melt away.

We spent the next three hours talking.  I was afraid several times when he asked about a bottle of red or a bottle of white or said he couldn't believe I looked so good after all this time that he was going to burst into song like he used to do. When I teased him about it he just laughed and said it was rather like the scene from an Italian Restaurant by Billy Joel.  Instead of talking about Brenda and Eddy we discussed Pam and Cathie.  I told him Pam was in the L.A. area working at a bank and travelling around the world.  That I had pictures and postcards from all sorts of fascinating places.  Cathie, on the other hand, had married a super nice guy but they had split because he wanted children and she did not. Besides she was busy protesting pigs raised in cages and doing women's marches.

When the subject changed to he and I he said he had married Sarah six months after I had gotten married.  The marriage did not last even a year (I did not say "I told you so") and he did get his MBA from Northwestern.  For several years he worked in New York on Wall Street but finally came back to Kansas City and had a real estate company and did investments.  Six months ago he married a gal named Lauren who was going to law school. He seemed happy with his life which was really all I cared about.

I filled him in on the last eleven years, seven months and seven days as best I could.  He liked that I had two boys and that I had finally graduated from college. My big question for him was why the stupid telegram on the day I got married. He laughed and asked if it got to me.
He said he meant every word that it said, he did want me to be happy and wished me all the best but at the same time why would he stop loving me.  He asked if I had stopped loving him and I said no that I always believed you could and did love many people at the same time but maybe in different ways.  He actually said he went to Muskogee a few years ago to try to find me but someone else lived in the house and Dad's pharmacy shop was closed. 

He walked me out to my car when it was time to get back to the boys. That was when he sang "I'll meet you any time you want at our Italian Restaurant.  How about next Thursday?".  How could I say no to that?


 

One of the Best and the Worst Years

There are times when writing these stories that it is difficult not only to remember everything but also to convey how hard it was to juggle the boys, college, the house, the race car and a husband who nothing seemed to make him happy.  It was an odd coincidence last Sunday while attending a concert of the SWOSU Music Department that sort of brought it all back. There was a girl somewhere in her twenties playing a flute while a small child slept on her chest in one of those papoose carriers.  I was extremely proud of that girl even though many probably did not feel the same way.

I can remember back then telling friends who questioned how I went back to college, ran a small business, took care of the boys and tried to be the perfect wife that I wished I was the kind of mother who enjoyed staying and baking bread.  Life would have been a lot easier although I knew that just wasn't me. In truth, looking back now, I wonder how I survived 1976.

When racing season started in the spring Wes was a very active 5 1/2 year old. He operated at high speed from morning until night, racing up and down the street on a Big Wheel or bicycle with a vivid imagination and non-stop talking.  Wally was 2 1/2 always happy and I think rather quiet trying to take in all the commotion around him.  We spent a lot of time together on the drive to Denton to college everyday and I think he enjoyed the quiet without his brother and the children his same age at the TWU Child Care Center.

I loved going to school but I think I loved going to school from the age of six. Something in my personality requires me to never go to class without being prepared as I never wanted  to appear stupid.  That probably comes from being told too many times that I was stupid and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. When Dr. Chandler, the plastic surgeon and my cheerleader on going back to college, would demand to see my grades at the end of each semester it was fun to show them off.
At the end of three semesters of Chemistry, Math and Biology I had managed not the 4.0 he said I needed but a 3.5 grade average I was really proud of.

The weekends leading up to the first drag race in March were a flurry of activity in getting the car painted and ready to go. Watus, his girlfriend Sam, Jimmy Parker and Dennis and I all got along well together but privately I had to put up with constant complaints from Dennis about this or that.  The first race at La Place in New Orleans I could not go due to an art show and it ended up with Jimmy Parker departing from the team.  Watus bought Jimmy's engine and a friend of Watus's, Bill Burns started helping on the car. Bill and his wife, Pam, were a great help and fun to be around.  Since Dennis knew very little about blown Chrysler engines and Watus was driving we needed Bill and his expertise.

My Ford lease vehicle for that year was a nine passenger van which doubled as a tow vehicle for the race car.  Many weekends all six adults and sometimes my two boys ran down the highway going to places like Carlise, Arkansas, Jackson, Mississippi, Houma, Louisiana, Houston, Tulsa or Amarillo.  Every race had it's funny stories and memorable events.  It must have been bad luck to make reservations at motels in advance but it was at times difficult to find rooms at midnight after driving half the night and racing all day. Then there was the time Dennis backed the van over the front of a Corvette.  Or the night Dennis and I left Dallas after a company party we had to attend and drove all night to meet Watus and Bill at the track in Amarillo. The fun part was that the car came close to winning or won every race we entered.  This was drag racing at it's best for me.

As the summer flew past Dennis became increasingly unhappy with situation with the race car.  I used all my positive powers to try to keep the waters smooth but when it was decided that the car should move out of our garage and down to Reeder Row in Dallas where all the top area racers were Dennis was very unhappy.  It only made sense to me as everyone who had cars on Reeder Row also had the knowledge to make the car a consistent winner. Besides the knowledge there was a lot of parts trading and fine tuning that went on that kept us winning races. In truth the car moved to keep Dennis from tinkering on it as he made no great effort to learn or understand the workings of the Chrysler engine.  It was then that I realized that Dennis did not care as much about winning as he did about simply owning a car that he could spend his time just tinkering on, bragging to his friends about and just sitting in the garage so he could look at it.

As with all racing engines which are just waiting for a chance to blow up ours did right at the end of the racing season.  It was good timing from the aspect that it happened before Dennis, Watus and Bill came to words about the partnership that would not have been pleasant.  We had entered the National race in Indianapolis a couple of weeks after the engine went kaput and no time to repair it. We already had tickets and even motel reservations for the six of us and we all went together but it was not a very pleasant weekend. After that weekend Dennis ended up selling the entire car to Watus and was quitting racing forever.  Needless to say I was not a happy camper.  Racing Top Alcohol with Watus and Bill was really fun even with all the ups and downs.  It was worth all the time and effort, worth all the extra hours of no sleep to stay caught up in school, worth all the money and things we had given up through the years to go racing.  I probably tried to get him not to sell the car but I had never learned how to argue with anyone and successfully make a point.  Instead I just added black stars on my imaginary chart every time I thought about it for years.

So, now what?  

Back To School

If I was terrified going to the first day of Algebra class the first day of summer school at Texas Women's University the trip home was even worse. The decision to take the class in summer school sounded very logical in my pea size brain as that was the class I was most worried about.  A concentrated class everyday with nothing else to have to study sounded logical.

Visions of Mrs. Sharp with her comfortable shoes, silky flowery dresses and blue lips and tongue (Dad said that was from medicine she took) flashed through my mind.  I was fourteen and in the ninth grade when she became my teacher for the first year of what was termed "New Math".  The poor woman had no idea of what she was teaching or at least that was my excuse.  Then there was Mr. Grant in the tenth grade who let me come in early everyday to try to make sense of all the silly little scribbles involved in Algebra. He was kind, always cheerful and tried hard to etch some of it in my brain to no avail.  I actually dropped out of accelerated classes in the eleventh grade using mononucleosis as an excuse when it was really a phobia about MATH. 

To make matters even worse Dr. Smith, head of the math department, looked younger than my twenty-eight years and the other seven students were giggling eighteen year old girls.  Nothing that first day of class made any sense at all and maybe it would be best just to never return to that place.  There were probably some tears that day as I only had a thirty mile drive home to decided whether to tell the babysitter to return the next day or not. Maybe I should just not go back to college, stay home and be a good Mom, a good corporate wife and drag racer.

When I got home Wes and Wally were happy, the babysitter was happy
and everything was just fine.  As the baby sitter walked out the door she said she would see me tomorrow at the same time.  Out of my mouth came the word "great".  Guess I had made up my mind to not give up. Those were the days long before the term multi-tasking was used for women but it was certainly the beginning of mine.

It was a struggle to find time to do homework or at least attempt to do homework.  Wes was a very active five year old and Wally was only nine months old.  Dinner needed to be on the table at 5:05 and evenings were always busy especially since I had spoiled Dennis and he was not enthralled with my going back to school.  That was when my habit of getting up during the wee hours of the morning began.  There is something about having the absolute quiet at two or three o'clock in the morning when no one wants anything and you can't do anything except sit quietly so as not to awake anyone that made studying easy and actually fun.

The second day of class was the real shocker.  Maybe Dr. Smith did not want to spend his summer grading homework papers as he called on each student to put a homework problem on the board.  He would then go through each of the algebra problems and show what was right and what was wrong.  Needless to say the first few weeks mine were completely wrong. Once I got over being embarrassed about not getting the problems right and I realized there was no crying in math something clicked.  All of a sudden the funny squiggles, infinity and the angle of the dangle made sense.  First semester I managed of B and the second semester, which was Trig, was actually a pretty easy A. Wow, maybe I wasn't so stupid after all.

While I was busy juggling children, college and house hold duties the new Paul Peyton chassis arrived.  Weekends were busy building a body for it as well as for other racers.  No vacations for the weary except the annual trip to Indianapolis for the big NHRA race of the year which had become our only vacation. One thing about drag racing is that they were always scheduled to end on a night before one had to go back to work the next day.  I lost count of the number of times through the years that we arrived home from some distance place around dawn when Dennis had to be at work that morning and the children had to be in school. I probably passed a lot of interesting sights to see but missed them due to total darkness.

When school started in the fall Wally was only ten months old and needless to say not potty trained yet so I kept the babysitting service at home.  It actually worked out well since Wes started half-day kindergarten and could walk the block home when I was not there. That he could walk home is probably not the approved thing to do these days but was quite normal then as well as no car seats and such. The other advantage to the baby sitting service was that if one sitter could not come it was the job of the service to find another one. That saved a lot of headaches.

Wes, Wally and a neighbor at Wes' 5th Birthday Party

Sometime that summer a guy came by the garage one day with a very interesting proposition concerning the dragster.  Dennis was dubious of strangers bearing gifts.  I was awestruck at the thought of it as it would change the entire direction of what we were doing in racing.

                                        Oreo Cookies, anyone?

I'd Have to Have been Crazy

It is interesting to look back an realize how some events change and shape our lives.  For some it may be one huge moment or event.  For me it was a quite subtle series of things.

Arriving home from the hospital with a new baby I not only had a husband and a four year old but also Dennis's Mother and Father. Dennis had taken some time off from work not to entertain his parents or help with four year old Wes but because he had stuff to do in the garage.  Dr. Herndon always saw his patients each week for four weeks after the delivery of a baby and it was not a great visit the week after Wally was born. Seems like my blood pressure was really high when I went in for the first checkup.  He instructed me to go home and tell Dennis's parents to go home when I explained the scenario at home.  He wanted me back in his office in four days and if the blood pressure was not down I would be back in the hospital.  That certainly did not go over well with Dennis but they did disappear the same afternoon.  Blood pressure was back to normal on Friday.

Wally was a newborn that people dream about having.  He slept through the night very early and just a sweet little guy.  At about five weeks of age he suddenly began having what is called projectile vomiting.  Hours after he ate he would throw up formula that seemed like it just came from the bottle instead of being sour smelling and it came up with such force that it flew across the room.  That was a little scary so off the see our pediatrician.

Dr. Pharo was a very soft spoken and very conscientious as I had learned with Wes.  He explained to me that it sounded like pyloric stenosis which causes the muscle at the bottom of the stomach to slowly close prohibiting the digestion of food.  Since it was a Friday he sent us home with instructions to give Wally Benadryl over the weekend to see if it helped.  When Dr. Pharo called on Sunday night I told him Wally was actually a little worse.  So he told me to take Wally to Children's hospital on Monday morning.  By a stroke of luck we got the best pediatric surgeon in the state of Texas.  Wally and I spent the night at the hospital, surgery the next morning, first feeding at 11:00 AM and sent home at 2:00 in the afternoon when the formula stayed down.  No more problems so it was pretty simple.

Dennis decided that the dragster would not run well because the chassis was no good.  Good old me did not argue even though there were a lot of very good running cars with the same chassis.  He sold the chassis and immediately ordered a new one from a local chassis builder and friend, Paul Peyton.  That made for a relatively quiet winter except 
that he found an English Bulldog puppy born on the same day as Wally so it became the Christmas puppy and dog number dog six. He also did replace the flathead engine in the 1950 Mercury with a Ford V-eight.

This was 1975 and the days of the dare devil motorcycle guy named Evel Knieval.  Wes had an Evel Knieval toy, we had actually gone to see him jump over many semi-trucks at Green Valley Raceway and all the kids in the neighborhood were crazy about him. I have to admit that I thought he was really pretty cool in that bad boy sort of persona.  The neighbor kids built a jump ramp on the sidewalk and one weekend while working in the garage I watched the kids, including four and a half year old Wes going up the ramp and flying through the air.  Sure looked like fun.  Looked like lots more fun than building somebodies's race car body.

Have you guessed yet what my next move was?  I borrowed one of the kid's bikes and decided to fly through the air myself.  It looked pretty easy and if Wes could do it I certainly could.  Well, I guess I did not fully get the idea that you should keep pedaling and keep the speed up as you were going up the ramp.  At the top of the ramp the front wheel dropped off the end due to lack of speed and I did fly through the air without the bike with the greatest of ease.  I splatted on the sidewalk on my face. All I can remember after landing was my neighbor calling the ambulance and Dennis asking me where my insurance card was. The ambulance ride is a total blur.

One look at me in the emergency room and they called a plastic surgeon as no other doctor wanted to touch the mess I had made of my face. I did get up off the gurney a couple of hours into the wait for the plastic surgeon to go to the bathroom.  I looked in the mirror and thought "Boy, you have really done it this time" as my whole face was skinned up and my upper lip was split from the center of my lip to the left corner of my nose.  Not a pretty sight.

The plastic surgeon arrived after about a three hour wait.  He looked at me and asked how in the hell did I do that.  When I told him I tried to do an Evel Knieval stunt he rolled in laughter and asked me how old I was.  Proudly I told him I was a twenty-eight year old mother of two.  He then told me I should have paid more attention to how many times Evel had crash landed so I came back at him with how sexy I thought Evel was.  We got off to a good start and I think he delighted in sticking the needles in to deaden the lip for a multitude of stitches. Evidently I had run one of my upper front teeth through my bottom lip and just to prove to me how stupid I was he did not deaden it when he stitched the inside of my bottom lip up. That Hurt! The really hard part before the lip healed up was laughing. I guess I was the only person who thought the stunt was funny and I would have to hold my lip together to laugh with no pain.

Mom and Dad had been after me to go back to school.  Dad and I spent many hours when I was growing up talking about doctors and medicine. He really always wanted me to go to medical school.  My SAT scores showed I should avoid math and science at all costs and study something a little less intellectual. I had managed to garner eighty-seven hours in college without those two subjects before I quit the third time. Due to their wanting me to finish and a couple of doctors that really inspired me I decided to go back to college.  

It was a little daunting to find out to graduate with a pre-med degree that I only needed fifty-two hours of math and science. I chose to go and was accepted at Texas Women's University in Denton rather than North Texas University as I felt I would do better not competing against guys in math and science. All my female friends thought I was crazy, my parents were overjoyed and Dennis was laughing figuring I would flunk out the first semester. I also kept selling ceramic items to Margaret's Bed and Bath shop on Greenville Avenue in Dallas to pay for my tuition even though Dennis moaned for three years that he never thought he would have to put his wife through college. Everyone in Dallas County must have had a little ceramic bathtub soap dish.

Dr. Chandler, the plastic surgeon, and Dr. Herndon both were inspiration and both became my cheerleaders for the next three years. Dr. Chandler did boob jobs for several of my friends, My Mom came down and had her eyes done later a facelift so he and I stayed in contact even though I did not do any more Evel Knieval stunts.  He was interesting from the fact that he got a lot of his training serving on a medical ship during the Vietnam War taking care of injured soldiers.  He also had Insurance Only written across my chart in big red letters.  Of course I had insurance but his policy was if insurance did not cover an accident that needed plastic surgery then he would never send out a bill.  He always said he made enough money from insurance and cosmetic surgeries to do just fine. He also looked over my past college transcripts and told me if I was really intending to try for medical school I needed a 4.0 average in the rest of my classes.  Nothing like a little pressure before you even get started.

Luckily I had used a babysitting service on some weekends when we traveled with the race car.  They were older ladies that came to your house and stayed for a couple of hours or for an entire weekend.  The great thing was that they charged a dollar an hour and the house was always cleaner than when I left it and the boys were happy.  Wally could not go to the TWU Child Care Center until he was potty trained and Wes would be in kindergarten the following September.  Knowing that the first class I had to take was Algebra I enrolled only in it for the summer school session in June of 1975.

Needless to say after I enrolled I became terrified.  I was ten years older than anyone else in the class, hadn't studied anything except a cookbook or car parts for six or seven years and the instructor was none other than the Dean of the Math Department. Just what was I thinking!

• 
  

Just Normal Everyday Life

Let's see - by the fall of 1967 I had been married a year and a half, Dennis was currently at his second job, we are the proud owners of a '61 and a '41 Chevy that teach a lot about auto mechanics on a daily basis, we had already moved five times and after five semesters of college I had not really decided what I wanted to be when (actually if) I grew up. The master plan for a path forward in life, build a race car, buy a house, have a baby, meant I needed to get a REAL job that paid more money than playing with children all day. Aah - time to become a normal person.

Back in those days if you didn't know anyone or have a family business to jump into the best way to find a job was to go to an employment agency.  Since Dennis worked in Grand Prairie and we lived in east Ft. Worth, maybe Arlington was the place to look. When the employment agency discovered I had no skills they sent me to a business they must have had a lot of experience with. It was one they must have sent many girls to with no skills.

It was a small parts manufacturing business on the western edge of Arlington.  It was owned by two gentlemen that I will call Mr. Scary ( A description, not his real name) and Bob. The office was a converted house and there was a machine shop at the back of the property.  Bob interviewed me and sat me down at an electric typewriter for the horrid typing test.  Well, I had never typed on an electric typewriter and flunked that one.  Guess Bob liked the fact that I spoke in full sentences, my dress covered more than the bottom of my underwear and I wasn't trying to look like the local stripper. Mr. Scary would hire people with different qualifications than Bob did including a receptionist that often asked questions like what state was Chicago in. I got hired.

Since I was so nervous when I went to interview for the job I somehow missed the fact that there was a bar in the house/office building.  About 4:00 every afternoon Mr. Scary had a parade of friends who would come by for a few drinks, a few very interesting stories and off-color jokes. Come deer season Mr. Scary would disappear for days only to return with his cronies in their vehicles with Bambi's strapped to the hoods. Bob and I would remain at our desks working away pretending that they were not there.  After all, somebody in the place needed to work.

The good thing about living in the little duplex in Ft. Worth was that I picked up a few skills when I got tired of white walls.  Unknown to the owner, I painted the kitchen cupboards and bought new hardware for them. Since it was years before mini blinds I learned how to make curtains out of really cheap material and wallpapered the bathroom. When it looked really comfy, Dennis decided we should move to Arlington. Oh boy, move number six in two years.

We found a house to rent that actually had a single car garage with a paved floor. One needs to note here that in looking for houses the garage was the most important attribute.  For a rent house it was not too bad and the curtains I made for the other place sort of worked plus it had a fenced backyard. The backyard meant we could get another dog. The cute little puppy grew to be a huge dog that we named Phydeaux.  He was a sweet guy but when he got big enough to jump the fence and scare all the neighbors when we went to work or eat the sofa when we left him in the house to long Dennis said he had to go. Goodbye dog number three.

Phydeauz (Fido)

Over the course of the next year Dennis tired of the '61 Chevy problems.
We looked at Mustangs but they were too expensive at $4,500 so he bought a new '68 stripped down pickup for $2,300.  He was also hellbent on taking the '41 back to his Dad and by some stroke of luck he found a '50 Mercury for $50.00.  It didn't run but all it required was a timing chain for $7.00 plus we found $20.00 stuffed in the overhead light.  What a steal!  I have to admit that I rather liked driving the Mercury.

Back at work, Bob decided he didn't really approve of Mr. Scary and the office situation so he went off and started his own company.  Since I had actually learned to type on an electric typewriter he called me once he was set up in the new business and I escaped Mr. Scary and went to work at Bob's new business.  About the same time Dennis and I started building race car bodies on the weekends. The extra money from building the race car bodies afforded us the extra money to build a race car - a dragster to be exact.

Since the business Bob had started had connections to purchase the tubing required to build dragster he let me purchase it at cost.  Then we took the tubing to Sand Springs, Oklahoma to the shop of a drag racer named Benny Osborn to build it.  I have to say here that in all my years of being involved in the sport, Benny was the nicest person I ever met. He also built us a beautiful and safe chassis.

                      Dragster Chassis and our neighbor boy, Bruce

By chance someone at LTV where Dennis worked saw an add in the paper that Ford/Lincoln/Mercury was looking for service reps. and thought it was something Dennis would like.  He went and applied and got the job as one of those company people who show up at a dealership when you have problems with your Mercury the dealership can't seem to fix. Now he was working in Carrollton, Tx, north of Dallas, and we were in Arlington.  No - not moving yet.  But they did not like his pickup in the Ford District Office parking lot.  Lucky for us that Hertz had a sale of rent cars each year and he bought a lovely '68 Mercury Marauder - gold - not one of Ford's most attractive cars - but cheap.

Funny story about the Marauder.  For the first time since we  went on the honeymoon Dennis decided we should go on vacation to Monterrey, Mexico with his Mother and niece.  Let me tell you the Mexicans loved the car.  Every time we parked it somewhere guys rushed up with buckets of water and wax.  When we came back they demanded money in a way you could not refuse. That had to be the cleanest car on the continent.  Dear Dennis ate tacos from a little street vendor and drank the water.  Add that to the fact that Monterrey was very industrial so he not only acquired Montezuma's Revenge but also a smog attack and couldn't breathe.  Nice....vacations are not turning out to be much fun as there is too much moaning being sick and bad words on the car getting spotless.

By the end of the third year of marriage we had now moved six times, had six different vehicles, Dennis was on his third job, acquired a dragster chassis, had two awful vacations and dog number 4, Herman, the wire-haired fox terrier who only spoke Spanish.  Oh, and a few cats I have not mentioned.  Just your normal, everyday life - right?

                                      Herman and our niece Ninnette

Period of Adjustment

If I thought the first year of marriage was only a period of adjustment just what was the next two or three?  I have been told that in looking back at past events you only remember the good parts and forget the bad. There must be some message in my not being able to remember any really happy times but only constant turmoil and stupid events.

Dennis decided I should go back to college in the fall of 1966 and become an English teacher.  Going to work might have been a better idea since money was tight but only having worked as a lifeguard had not provided me with many job skills.  So I enrolled in Arlington State College in Arlington.  Since this was my first time to go to school in Texas I was hit with taking all the state required courses for graduation which were less than inspiring. With tuition only being $5.00 a semester hour it was cheap enough.

Going back to college as a freshman at twenty years of age and married was difficult but not knowing anyone was the hard part.  Trying to handle taking care of the house and Dennis was the harder part as it seemed there was never time to study for the sixteen hours of classes I was carrying.  Luckily for me there was another girl, a few years older, in most of my classes.

Gretchen was a tall, beautiful girl who stuck out among the teeny boppers more than I did.  She was married to a much older man who was very prominent in Dallas social circles and very wealthy.  Somehow we became friends.  We arranged all of our classes the second semester
to be the same and spent all of our free time at school together.  Without Gretchen I would have never made it through two semesters. 
Neither of us were enthralled with the college and one attempt at socializing outside of school was a disaster.  She invited Dennis and I to a sports car race one weekend.  Her husband had a Lotus and although I enjoyed the race, liked her husband and had a great time.  Dennis was rude and hated every minute of being there.  She transferred to SMU the next fall and I had a hard time thinking about going back to Arlington without her.

Dennis changed jobs during my second semester and went to work for LTV in Grand Prairie, Texas.  He also decided that driving a 61 Chevy with a six-cylinder engine was not cool so a lot of time the second semester on weekends were spent doing an engine swap to upgrade to a V-8.  I don't remember why we got rid of the Volkswagon except Dennis hated it so when I got a summer job with the Ft. Worth Park Department I needed a car.

Dennis's Dad just happened to have an all original, except for the upholstery, 1941 Four-door Chevy sitting in his driveway not being used.  My thought on cars is that if it has four wheels and runs it is fine. So, we borrowed the 41 Chevy for me to drive and towed it to Texas. What a fun car to drive with only one minor little glitch.  Seems like the radiator had some problems and would leak when it got a little overheated.  It as easy to tell when this happened as little drops of water would appear on the windshield.  That was an easy fix as I just carried milk bottles in the backseat full of water and stopped and added water when needed.

The Park Department playground job was awesome.  There were twenty playgrounds at the elementary schools and the recreation centers.  Each one had a boy and girl partner to work at them. I had a partner named Howard.  He was a tall, gangly guy my same age with the biggest feet I have ever seen.  He was going to TCU and wanted to be an Episcopal priest.  Our job was to play with kids all day.  We had a school playground in the morning in a rather poor neighborhood and one in the afternoon in a very rich one. Both of our cars were filled with sports equipment, boxes of board games and craft making items. Our job was to play with the kids and teach them lifetime sports which were bowling, golf, badminton and tennis.

The morning playground had between 40 to 60 kids everyday hanging on the fence waiting for us to get there at 8:00 in the morning.  The afternoon had maybe ten kids the first week and then none.  They cancelled the afternoon playground and made Howard and I the travelling play directors for the big contest the end of the summer. Howard's mother had us come to their house everyday for lunch or if she was busy we would go downtown and his Dad would take us out. Our playground kids won almost every contest at the end of the summer including the play contest.  The last day the kids cried because it was over and I have to admit Howard and I did too.  

I tell this story for several reasons.  First of all I have wondered through the years whether the kids or Howard and I learned the most.
We learned a lot about kids less fortunate than we were, kids that needed snacks because there was no breakfast, kids that never had adults play with them and kids that just needed to have attention. I have also wondered how Howard has done in life as we lost touch.

The other reason I had to tell this story is partly due to the funny looking 41 Chevy.  Dennis had put the bigger engine in the 61 Chevy and things did not work out as well as he had hoped.  That may be putting it mildly.  It seemed like every three weeks or so the clutch plate in the transmission would shear apart - meaning no clutch, no driving possible. So I would have to drive the 41 Chevy to where ever it decided to happen, hook up his car with the trusty tow bar, stop by an auto parts store for a new clutch disc and tow the 61 home.

Here is where the fun began. In the dark of night with only a trouble light he would have to drop the transmission and replace the clutch disc
while laying on our driveway. My part in all this was to be like a nurse 
assisting a doctor during surgery handing him the needed tools while learning a whole stream of new words and phrases. If anyone can tell what "I'll be a suck egg dog" refers to I would appreciate a definition.
This too often an operation on the car made me wonder if it would be like a surgeon operating on an appendicitis and only cleaning out the infection but leaving the appendix.  Was it one of those cases where Chevy put in some bolts that were not really needed so you just leave them out when putting a car back together?  I think I heard car companies did that so they could charge more money.

On weekends when there was no drag racing we went to see family in Oklahoma.  Most of the weekend were spent at Dennis's home in Warner since my family was a mess.  No one ever mentioned Dad to Mother or Mother to Dad.  Paul had remarried to a girl with a cute little boy and I lost all contact with his first wife, Joan, and son, Don. That was hard as Joan and I were really good friends. Plus with Mother dumping Dad Dennis's parents no longer liked her. Mother at this time was going through her second childhood, bought a little house in Muskogee and a Corvette.  Visiting was a nightmare to say the least.

Since I was not enthralled with college when Gretchen was not returning somehow a master plan was conjured up. The new plan was to (1) Build a race car since that was all Dennis thought about and we spent every weekend going to watch them (2) Buy a house (3) Have a baby.  That required dollars so I had to find a job doing something that paid a little more than playing with children all day.

Remember what I said in the last story about friends?  I think maybe Gretchen and Howard were the beginning of learning a very important coping skill.

I Should Have Owned A Moving Company or At Least A Truck

                                                      Moving, Moving, Moving

If anyone has read my profile you probably notice that I have a tendency to jump into things before I really pay attention to all the particulars of the situation.  I am afraid that has been true all my life, even to this day.  But that is also why I think it has been an exciting and fun roller coaster ride.  Somewhere through the years I decided that I had amazing "springback".  Think of one of those spring type doorstops. No matter how much you try to bend or force it down it just pops right back up.

After a less than desirable wedding and honeymoon getting settled in Farmington, New Mexico was not easy.  Farmington was an oil boom town on the edge of the Navajo Reservation and although it may be a tourist destination now it certainly was not in 1966.  Dennis had made no friends in the seven months he had been living there and working for Mid-Continent Oil and Supply and I don't remember meeting a single person except some Jehovah Witnesses that came to the door once.  But we did not live there long as he was transferred to the main office in Fort Worth three weeks after we got there. Let's see - married on January 28th, moved to Farmington and moved to Ft. Worth on February 21st. 

I have totally blocked the move to Ft. Worth out of my memory but I am assuming we must have rented a truck as there was no way we could do the Okie/VW routine with his stuff too.  In typical Dennis fashion we made the 800 mile trip in one day as staying in a motel was a waste of time and money.  One night in a motel in Ft. Worth and then rented a furnished apartment the next morning.  Since Mid-Continent's office was downtown it was important to find a location close.  Wow, we found one four blocks south of the huge Post Office and I-30 and only ten city blocks from his office. 

It was actually not a bad apartment for $65.00 a month and it had a swimming pool. I took Dennis to work each morning and with a map of Ft. Worth and the phone book in the car I toured the city then rushed home to fix dinner before I went to pick him up.  When the weather got warmer and other tenants had parties at the pool in the evening Dennis decided it was not a nice place to live.

By some stoke of luck the owners of the apartments had a duplex only three blocks further south. Still close to downtown and closer to John Peter Smith Hospital.  We were entertained all night by the sound of sirens from both ambulances and police cars.  There was even a nice policeman who came to check on us often which gave us the idea that maybe the neighborhood was less than desirable.  The duplex was really nice and much larger than the apartment.  There was only one small problem in that it had a water cooler instead of an air conditioner.   It was a particularly rainy, muggy summer and by August there was a nice coat of black mold on the bedroom walls. Time to move - again.

                                                            The Moldy Place

I can remember looking at only one place again for this move.  It was another duplex one block south of East Lancaster in a nice older neighborhood.  It had a garage (with a dirt floor), a big yard and no furniture. We managed to find a cute 1950's round top refrigerator for $90.00 and an antique bedroom set for $50.00.  That got us moved in....what more do you need? After a few weeks of curse words about not having any more furniture Dennis's Mom, Alpha, came down and one Saturday while Dennis was at an Air Force Reserve meeting we went shopping. Garage sales and thrift stores came in handy.
When he arrived home there was a kitchen table and chairs, sofa, a chair, end tables and lamps. I always liked Dennis's Mom coming to visit as we had fun together and Dennis tended to not use bad words in front of her.

                                                            The Cute Place

So, let's see where we are at:

Married the end of January and by the middle of August we had moved four times. Is this a sign someone is not happy anyplace he lives?

 The VW was on it's third clutch when the car was only a year old since someone drove it like it was a 327 with a four on the floor.

We had not met anyone except people who wanted us to go to their church (told all of them I was Jewish) and the new next door neighbors. The neighbors did not have a car so the garage was all ours.  We nicknamed them Two-Ton-Tillie and Country Coy.  Two-Ton ran the car wash down the street and Coy made Ranch Style Beans at the bean factory.  According to Two-Ton all Coy would eat was taters and beans. We tried not to be too friendly with them or to put it bluntly, there were no dinner parties.

Oh, and the constant cockroach problem was because they lived at Two-Ton's but smelled the gourmet meals from our place and scrambled over. Guess the roaches were tired of Ranch Style Beans.

We got a cute little American Spitz puppy.  I loved it since it didn't yell at me but it barked a lot so Dennis gave it away.  Then there was a kitten, Duke, that we both adored that adopted a litter of kittens from a bad mother cat. Dennis hated the mother cat and kittens so he took all of them to the pound.  Duke got sick and passed away.  Then we found a little German Shepard at a junk yard and named him Oscar.  He was fun and cute but as he got bigger Dennis did not like him either so I think he went to the pound. Not doing well with pets.

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                                          Duke and Daiquiri

I had a job in a department store for a few months but the hours were not the same as Dennis's and there was no dinner on the table at 5:00 everyday.  He decided I should go to Arlington State College in September of 1966 and finish getting a degree.  It seems really silly that I would have agreed to become an English teacher so I could have summers off.  Maybe that song from Bye, Bye Birdie was stuck in my head.  Gads, I still know all the words.

Going to school meant we needed another car. One Saturday we bought a 1940 Ford pickup. It was beautiful but after we got it home Dennis discovered it had copper tubing for brakes lines. We took it back and found a 1961 Chevy that looked good but when it started up you could not see the car for all the white smoke coming out of the engine. It was some minor problem that Dennis was able to fix.

For fun Dennis tried building model airplanes you fly.  He would sit for hours gluing the thin paper on the struts and then we would go to Forest Park on Sundays to fly them. Well, sort of fly them.  Seems like everyone he built took off, went straight up and then crashed straight down.  I think three times ended that hobby.  I made him go roller skating at this really cool outdoor rink one night and thirty minutes into the session he informed me we were never skating again.(No, HE was never skating again. It did not mean I was not skating again.)  Dancing did not ever happen. So we spent weekends watching drag racing at Green Valley Raceway from the spectator stands or running home to Warner to his Mom's house to go fishing.....ugh!

To top off the wonderful year of 1966 my brother Paul and Joan got a divorce. Mother had me come home on the bus sometime before we had a second car to try to talk brother Kenny out of marrying an older girl with two children right after he graduated from high school. I have to confess I did not work too hard at trying to change his mind. To really top the year off after Kenny got married Mother filed for divorce, locked Dad out of the house without telling him and never spoke to him again.

Like the Elton John song - I'm Still Standing - not defeated yet.  Being the eternal optimist things would get better. After all, isn't the first year of marriage an adjustment period?

Not the Clever's

I have always thought how lucky I have been to have grown up in what is called the Baby Boomer generation.  Other age groups will argue that theirs was better but growing up with the music of the Beatles, Elvis and Chuck Berry gave us music to dance by and dance we did.  Boys learned how to fix up older cars if they could not afford the advent of 
Mustangs or Corvettes and drag racing was in it's infancy. The teen movies like Gidget, the Beach Party shows and others instilled the idea that boy meets girl, trouble happens and a breakup occurs but love prevails in the end.  

There was a great deal of innocence and an optimistic attitude that every thing was going to work out great regardless of what happened. 
I woke up every morning confident that it was going to be a wonderful day.  But life is not the movies and all families were not like Beaver Cleaver's.

After dinner the evening Barney went back to Columbia Mother said she wanted to talk to me.  We sat at the kitchen table in a fashion similar to a scene from Dragnet where the interrogation takes place.  This had happened before so I prepared myself for what was to come. I could have never actually prepared myself for that conversation.

Mother

She wanted to know, of course, what Barney's father did for a living and how a college student drives a new Corvette.  Sorry Mom, I didn't have an answer except that his father had passed away when he was an infant and there was a stepfather he didn't talk about very much. Why would I ask him where he got his money when I had been taught never to ask those questions?  What I did tell her was that he was a good student with a 4.0 average, had been an Eagle Scout (not mentioning that she had wanted Paul to be one) and that he wanted to go to Northwestern and get his MBA.  That should impress any parent, right?

Wrong.  Well, on second thought I guessed she was impressed since her next question was just what did he see in me?  Ever have that sudden feeling you couldn't breathe?  Thoughts raced through my head like, would she like to call him and ask him but I knew better than to go there. I probably mumbled something like I didn't know. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised since as hard as I tried to get good grades and do the right thing nothing I did had ever really pleased her.  
She had never liked anyone I dated before thinking they were not good enough for me and now I am not good enough for Barney.

Somehow the interrogation finally ended with something about she didn't send me to Stephens to date or to have fun.  Then there was something about perhaps running around with rich girls made me think I was something I was not. I didn't cry myself to sleep that night, I just cried all night and thought of all the times I had disappointed her by being a cheerleader, doing plays she never came to and just breathing in general. On the other hand I always did all those things she wanted me to do like running for Miss Muskogee, being trophy girl at the stock car races, not going to slumber parties or doing the things all the other girls got to do.  It was like walking on a tightrope everyday.

The next morning she came in my room at 5:00 AM all cheerful as if there had been no discussion the night before.  It was obvious I had been crying all night since my eyes were almost swollen shut but I put on my happy face and had a cheerful cup of coffee with her, helped Kenny with his papers and acted as normal as possible when I wanted to scream.  I fell back into my normal pattern of behavior with her to try to keep the waters calm.  Somehow I knew my return to Stephens was hanging in the balance as well as my relationship with Barney.

Barney called before I left for work that morning and told me how much fun he had with me in Muskogee and how much he loved and missed me.  I did not tell him anything about the conversation with Mother.  
That was normal behavior for me as I never could admit to anyone that our house was not like the Clever's.  I did call Cathie as she had figured out a lot about my home situation during the time we lived together at Stephens. Talking to Barney and Cathie helped me get through the next couple of weeks.

There were lots of phone calls, cards and letters that summer from not only Barney, Pam and Cathie but from the other girls from Stephens.  Some were spending the summer at beaches somewhere or travelling in Europe.  It was fun to get so much mail and I made sure Mother saw the posts cards from exotic places around the world.  Of course there were times I wished I was someplace else but I was happy for all my friends doing exciting things. There was no discussion about Stephens even though there were letters for my parents from them.  

I spent a lot of time with my little nephew, Don.  He turned three that summer and there was a big family birthday party.  Paul had made him a stock car for him out of a pedal car.  I was always available to baby sit and Don loved to go for ice cream with Aunt Nana.  He got to cruise Muskogee in either my VW or Joan's VW convertible as a trip for ice cream was always a good excuse to run around town at night.

Don, Dad, Me and Little Girl

My neighbor, Tom, and I hung out a lot.  He was extremely funny and could brighten any day.  Tom, Kenny and I somehow managed to get tickets to go see Herman and the Hermits in Tulsa. I had to laugh as they sang "Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter" because when that song came out Barney changed all the words and sang it like he was singing to my Mother.  Wonder what she would have thought about that one?

I managed to keep the waters between Mother and I calm until I told her Barney was coming back the first week in August.  That was when she announced that she and Dad were not sure they could afford to send me back to Stephens.  Okay - for one thing, Dad did not agree to that but he would not disagree with Mother.  Secondly, with a scholarship and a grant tuition, room and board for both semesters was half paid for.  In my typical fashion I did not remind Mother that it was her idea in the first place to go to Stephens.  The sad part was that no one argued with Mother except Paul.  I guess Dad, Kenny and I watched some of the consequences of arguing between them and knew it was fruitless to try to get your point of view across.

Barney was to arrive the following Sunday and I had no idea how the visit would go.