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 met Dorothy a year or so after I went to
work at Firestone in Minneapolis. I was living with Martha and John Munson
at the time. The circumstances involved a visit from my dad. My dad had moved out to
the San Francisco area to live near my sister Frances and some of the other kids
there. Over the holidays, he came back here to visit and one evening he wanted to go to St. Paul to see his sister,
Pauline, and her husband, Sherm Robinson. So we went, and we were sitting around there
having a good chat when the Fornells stopped by and Dorothy was with them.
The Fornells were family friends of the Robinsons. About three or four
nights a week, they all played cards together. Dorothy had come along with them that night because her sister Marge was married
to Vernon Robinson, who was my cousin. Vernon and his wife lived there with his parents. (Vern never did take care
of his family financially. Basically, he was not a productive person, and he was a big drinker.)
Vern and Marge were going out to a beer joint to spend the evening and the
older folks decided to play cards. Drinking was not my style -- that was something I was not particularly attuned to. For
that matter, Dorothy wasn't either. But we decided to go along. So that was the unlikely start of our romance -- going to
Steve Sweitz' bar on Payne Avenue in St. Paul. It was a wonderful evening because I was thrilled to meet her and
be with her. We hit it off right from the start.
She was a little bit of a nut and had a good sense of humor -- a silly sense
of humor. That's what struck me first. It was one big laugh after another. She always was that way and that's one of the
things that people liked about her. I was walking on air that night because I knew immediately that she was the gal for
me. It was just a magnetism, a spark between us. And it was mutual.
When we came back to the folks place afterwards, my aunt, who was a very good cook
and a good hostess, had made some food. She was great for desserts. I think she had pie with whipped cream that night.
That was the first of quite a few experiences at my aunt's place. She was
a fantastic cook. In those days I could eat about enough for two people. She would prepare the food and keep it coming at me.
Then she would laugh when I'd take another helping. She thought it was funny and liked to see me eat. She's shove pie at
me. She'd have a quarter of a pie of one kind, and a quarter of a pie of another kind, and I was equal to the task. She would
sit back and watch me eat and laugh.
Dorothy and I met on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's and our
first date was on New Year Eve (1938). We went out with Vern and Marge and Bing, my
boyhood friend from Claremont, and his girlfriend, Ruth, who was going to the university. She stayed at the ladie's hall
there. I think it ws called Murray Hall. Our first stop to celebrate was at a joint of some sort in the university area.
Unfortunately, my friend Bing had come to town without having anything to eat, so going out drinking made him sick. Therefore,
he and his date weren't having such a great time, and soon we had to take Ruth back to the university because they had a
curfew for the women there.
We took Ruth back and then headed for Minneapolis. In the middle of the
Cedar Avenue bridge on the way to Seven Corners, the car quit. It was a bitter cold night, probably below zero. Eventually,
some kind soul came along and gave us a push. That got us off the bridge, but the car wouldn't start, so I just parked it
beside the road. Vern and Marge and Dorothy and I went to the closest beer joint at Seven Corners to dance. Bing, of course, was
without a date and sick. So he didn't come with us. He stayed in the car.
We spent some time in this beer joint, maybe a couple of hours. When we
finished dancing and decided to go home, I got a taxi and went to the car to pick up Bing, but he wasn't there. We found
him up behind a billboard being sick. Finally, we got him in the taxi in the front seat with the driver, who was very
uneasy about him. He was afraid he would mess up his cab. The only thing I could think of was to take him to Martha's
house where I was staying. That was on 29th Avenue near Hiawatha. So we took him over there and nobody was home.
Sis and her husband John were gone. It was completely dark in
there and we didn't kow what to do with Bing, so we laid him on the living room floor. He was passed out, and we put some
papers under his head in case he got sick some more. And away we went. I guess he woke up in the middle of the night and
didn't know where he was and started wandering around the house. Sis and John were in bed by then but hadn't seen him.
He started wandering around and finally found the bathroom, and they didn't know who the heck it was running around the
house.
We took the taxi back to St. Paul to take Dorothy home. I wasn't making
much money, but I was the only one with any money at all, so I paid the taxi fare for the evening for everyone. I think I
was making about $90 a month then. After taking Dorothy home, I stayed that night at Robinsons'. They were always very
hospitable. Then Dorothy and I got together again the next day. We borrowed Vern's Dad's
car and went over to see what was the matter with my car. We found out that the water pump was leaking and was draining back
on the distributor and shorting it out. So all we had to do was tighten up the water pump and put a little anti-freeze in
it. That worked out all right.
From that weekend on, we started seeing each other two or three times a
week. I don't know when I started calling Dorothy "Dort," but that's a nickname I gave her. Using the full first name
always seemed too formal to me. It seemed more intimate to use a nickname, particularly in this case.
I thought about proposing marriage after about our third date. I wasn't going
to let her get away from me. The first time I kissed her, I think I felt it from my head to my toes. I tingled all over.
A popular song in those days was When a Prince of a Fella Meets Cinderella. Of course, we felt this was written
just for us because of the way we felt about each other. It didn't make any difference that we were poor and didn't have
much of anything. We had each other and that was enough for us at the time.
I don't quite recall the details of when I actually did propose. The thing
that really caused us to get married so soon -- just six months after we met -- was the fact that her father was a heavy
drinker. When he was sober, he was a very nice fellow, but when he had been drinking he was a very disagreeable person.
He disliked me right from the start because I wasn't a drinker, and I wouldn't drink with him. One evening I came over to
see Dorothy and he wanted us to go for a ride. He had been drinking and was just being mean. Dorothy was always considerate
of her mother, and concerned about her because if the family, or Dorothy or I did anything that he couldn't control, he
would take it out on her mother. That was why, when he decided to act up, we had to go along with him -- because of fear
that he would take it out on her mother. So this time, he wanted to go for a ride and wanted to take the whole family.
Dorothy's aunt, who was quite ill, was staying with them. She was in the last stages of muscular dystrophy, just wasting away,
and she only weighed 70 or 80 pounds. So we put this poor little lady in the car, and then Dorothy's mother and Dorothy
and I got in, and he took us for a ride. Of course, he stopped at every beer joint on the east side of St. Paul. He'd
stop at a joint and make me come in with him, and he'd order a drink, and I'd have to drink with him. And this went on and
on and on. We must have stopped at half a dozen different places. The others would sit out in the car while he and I went in and
had a drink. It was a miserable evening. So afterwards, I said to Dorothy, "This is for the birds. Let's get the heck out
of here." We had talked about getting married, but not much. We decided after that night that we would get married.
I had about $25 or $30 in the bank and I drew that out. We were going to go
down to Iowa the next weekend. That was the only place you could go and get married without a wait. Her parents didn't
know about it, nobody did. We just took off. First Dorothy went with her mother and bought a special dress for the occasion.
She made some excuse about why she had to have the dress, and she worked up a fib to tell her folks about going to some
girlfriend's house for the weekend.
So we took off to Iowa. It was July 16, 1938. Esterville was the first
county seat that we came to, so we stopped there. However, the courthouse was closed and we had to hunt around and get someone
to come and give us a license. We were able to do that, and after we got the license I had to go out and get a perfect stranger
to swear that he knew us. He had to sign the marriage certificate. Then we had to find a Justice of the Peace. The fellow
at the courthouse recommended a woman Justice of the Peace who lived nearby. She was a big buxom gal, one of those people
who are very much in charge. She married us in a simple civil ceremony.
It was not a very memorable honeymoon. We took a room at the big hotel there,
which was almost a museum piece, a real old hotel. It was ungodly hot, and this room had no ventilation or circulation of air.
I think we went out to a movie for entertainment and to cool off during the evening. The following day we went back to
Minneapolis.
It wasn't as happy an occasion as it could have been. Both of us were
uptight because we were worried that we didn't have money enough to live on, and I was worried that I didn't have money
enough to support her. As a result, there was a feeling of tension about the whole situation. But we were in love, too. So that
feeling offset the other feelings. Dorothy was working in a menial job at the Miller Hospital, making beds or something
like that. She went back to work and we lived separately for a couple of weeks before we told people that we were married.
In the meantime we looked for a place to live and we bought a whole houseful
of furniture for $300 from the cut-rate furniture store in Minneapolis. It was very meager, but we finally got set up in a
little place on 36th Avenue about two blocks from Lake Street.
Her parents didn't cause any problems. They didn't seem to care much one
way or the other. Her father wasn't angry or anything, but he never did get over that hostile feeling towards me.
On 36th Avenue we lived upstairs in a single family house that had been converted
into two apartments. It was small and the rent was low which is what we were concerned about. A problem developed with the
lady who lived below us. She was simply a mean person, and nothing we did was to her satisfaction. She disliked Dorothy
for some reason, and I'd come home and Dorothy would be upset or crying because of something that woman had done. We had a
lot of bad experiences with her, and we decided to find a different place. After about six months, we found a place on
4th Avenue near Lake Street. It was an old four-plex.
I remember buying a cabinet type radio for Dorothy on our first anniversary.
We were great people for radios, but we had just a cheap little plastic radio that was kind of squawky. That was before TV
and we listened to the radio a lot. So I bought this radio cabinet on a special deal from Firestone. I think it cost $25.
I had to carry the whole thing home on the streetcar, and I surprised her with it. She was very pleased. Of course, in
those days, any little thing you got, you appreciated more.
Our first dining room table was an old card table, and we ate on that for a
long time. It had a weak leg and used to collapse once in awhile. Then we bought a kitchen table. Each time we got something
new, we were happy about it. The future always looked bright to us, and we always looked forward to having something better.
Things constantly improved. Even when we had very few material things, we were happy.
There were four or five highlights in my life that really thrilled me, and
Dick's birth was one of them. We were living on 4th Avenue when Dick was born,
April 13, 1939. Of course, I took time off from work and went to the hospital. I was terribly worried, a typical
stererotype of a fussy father having a baby. I worried about everything -- whether the baby would be all right, and whether the
doctor would be conscientious. At the same time, it was one of the highlights of our lives when he was born. We were
really happy. I kind of wanted a boy, though it really didn't make a difference, and the Lord was good to us because we
got a boy and a girl later on. Our little boy baby wasn't very pretty when I first saw him, all red and wrinkly, and I
wasn't too sure he was all right. But he was perfect. It was a normal birth, not particularly easy or hard. Dorothy
stayed in the hospital about ten days which was normal for the time.
Dorothy had quit work when we set up housekeeping, so we had been getting
along on my small salary. It wasn't much, and it all went out to pay the bills, so we had no savings at all. When Dick
was born, I remember I had to sell my car in order to have enough money to get them out of the hospital. I think I got
$125 for it. That paid the bill.
When she got the baby home, he cried a lot, and the doctor didn't think he was
getting enough milk. Dorothy was trying to nurse him, so she decided to wean him and put him on the bottle. I remember one
of the few times we went out to a movie and she had just weaned him, the milk started to come and it was flowing down the
front of her dress. She had a heck of a time trying to stop it, and we laughed about that. A popular song at that time
was one about the Jones family. The first line of it was, "There's a great song in the air, the Jones family has a new
heir!" It was a happy song that seemed to express our sentiments about our new little baby. I used to sing it to myself.
We were just so happy at that time. We felt like jumping out of our skins.
That summer, Dorothy took him outside and took off his clothes and put him on a
blanket in the sun. We wanted to make sure he had enough vitamin D. I remember taking a picture of that. I took a
lot of pictures with a box camera, and developed them myself. I had a basement studio where I built a darkroom. That was a
little hobby I had. One year I made my own Christmas cards with pictures of the kids. That was when I was working for
Firestone so I had evenings and weekends to spend on photography. (The early family pictures in this book are some that I
shot and developed.)
It was tough being without a car, especially for Dorothy. She didn't have
friends in Minneapolis, and she was lonesome. Her friends and family came over to visit sometimes, but it was a long drive from
St. Paul, so it wasn't very often. And without a car, we were not able to go and do many things that we wanted to do.
In those days most people didn't have money enough to hire babysitters. If you couldn't get a relative to take care of the baby,
you didn't go anyplace. Dorothy's folks would come over once in awhile, but it was quite a drive from the east side of St. Paul
over to Minneapolis, particularly when we were on 4th Avenue. I think I was making $120 a month at that time. We were
living on $5 a week budget for groceries. Dorothy was a real penny pincher.
I wasn't really satisfied with the place on 4th Avenue because it was
drafty and cold in the winter and hot in the summer. We eventually moved to 28th Avenue South, near 42nd Street,
not far from Lake Hiawatha. Dick was about six months old when we moved. My sister
Martha lived on 29th Avenue, so we were just a block away from her. We lived in a
duplex. There were three or four in a row and they all looked alike. I used to ride the streetcar to and from work, and
sometimes I would read on the streetcar, and go past my stop on the way home. One time I did this and I jumped off the streetcar,
and ran back to the apartment. I put the key in the lock, opened the door and got half way into the room when I realized I
was in the wrong place. It was a strange thing. My key fit that lock. I got out of there as quickly as I could.
I was working nights and I had to leave home at 11:00 p.m. to go to
the midnight shift. I was recapping tires at Firestone. I remember Dorothy standing in the doorway, weeping, as she
waved goodbye to me every night as I went to work. She was so lonesome. It was really a bad time for her. It wasn't so bad
for me because I had my interests at work and I could tolerate it. But it was a lonesome period for both of us because of my
job and without a car we couldn't get about and go places to have any real fun.
I couldn't say the early days were generally happy or unhappy. We had
extremely happy moments and there was also a lot of grief. But we were enough in love that we had memorable times.
Marge and Vern would often come over and
spend the weekend with us. As I mentioned earlier, Vern was the greatest non-producer I ever met in my life, but he was a
very resourceful and handy guy when it came to doing things. That was another reason why it was a shame that he wouldn't do
something productive because he could have done well for himself. Anyway, they came to see us when I was working nights
at Firestone.
One time he came over with Marge and dropped her off at the house, then he came
down to the shop to pick me up. He came in while I was changing clothes in the store basement, and he noticed a big merchandise
dsiplay stored down there. He looked at that, and he said, "Boy, you could make a good ping pong table out of that. I
wonder if they would give you that display." So I asked the boss if I could have it, and he said, "Sure, take it and gt it out of
there." So we took that and made the nicest ping pong table out of it. We had quite a sizable basement in our house, and we set
it up there. We proceeded to have ping pong tournaments every weekend. Many times we'd play until daylight. Vern was the
type of guy that if he was winning, he wanted to rib you and laugh and have fun, but if he started losing, it wasn't
fun anymore. Of course, I had never played ping pong before, and he had layed quite a bit. So he beat me at first. He
was really having a wonderful time razzing me. Then, as time went on, I became better and better. When I started beating him,
it wasn't funny anymore.
We had another cousin in town, Joe Stimler,
and his wife, Red. They would come over and join us in the ping pong tournaments. We all made our own fun and recreation. On our
first anniversary, Dorothy and I celebrated by getting two nickel beers. They had nickel beer at the grocery store.
Then we listened to our new radio. That was our big celebration, and we enjoyed it.
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