Saturday, February 13, 2021

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- How Did You Meet the Love Of Your Life?

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!


Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along - cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1) Tomorrow is Valentine's Day.  Write about how you met the love of your life.  No fair picking "genealogy" as thel ove!

2)  Put it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link in a comment to this post.

Here's mine:

I was 24 years old, never been kissed (much?), and self-conscious as all get out about it.  I was working at Rohr Aircraft in Chula Vista, and had just started driving the year before.  I was in an apartment with my friend John (the freeloader, it turned out) in Pacific Beach and had just bought my Thunderbird.  I hung out in the evenings at the bowling alley in North Park, bowled in several leagues there, one with friend John, and we drank and kibitzed in the bar afterwards.

John had a girlfriend named Sherry, and she needed another male for her bowling team, so John asked me if I would like to bowl with him and Sherry and another female.  I said "sure."  The "another female" was Linda, whom Sherry had met at the U.S. Navy Air Station Officer's Club in Coronado (Sherry was in the Naval Reserve).  So we bowled the league match, and I couldn't keep my eyes off this tall, beautiful, tanned and poor bowler... who was a great encourager.  She was a first year elementary school teacher in Coronado and was from San Francisco.  It was February 1968. 

We adjourned to the bar, John and I played pool for awhile, and we all had our favorite drinks.  Linda and Sherry had to leave, so John and I said goodnight and went to King Luis' Inn (a bar in Linda Vista) and eventually home.  

The league went on for months, and Linda and I never had a date, but we talked and drank some almost every week.  I was interested in another woman from Oregon whom I'd met several times at radio conventions and we carried on a long distance conversation.  

On Memorial Day morning, Linda was resting in bed in her Chula Vista apartment when a running pickup truck was put into gear by two young boys while their father met someone.  The truck backed up into the wall of Linda's apartment and threw her out of bed against the opposite wall, scrunched in her mattress with her nightgown up around her neck.  The father came in through the hole in the wall, called out, and talked to Linda and yelled "she's alive."  The ambulance came and took her to the hospital and her parents came down from San Francisco to help.

While she was in the hospital, Sherry told John about it and he told me, and we decided we would take her some gifts in the hospital.  We stopped at a liquor store, and bought some beer and some magazines and headed to the hospital.  We passed a beautiful yard in Coronado with bright red roses, and we stopped and I asked the owner, who was pruning the roses, if we could have a rose to take to our friend in the hospital.  He cut several for us, and off we went.  We opened one of the beer bottles and put the roses in it, and visited Linda and gave her the magazines and the rose bottle.  Later, she said she drank the beer.

Linda's parents took her off to recuperate from her broken vertebra in San Francisco, and she returned in September for the next school year.  We stopped bowling together, but Sherry had a weekly pool party at her condo and we were all there, along with many others.  I still had not asked her out for a date.  The other interest of mine was uninterested, so I was still footloose.  

Several of my bowling buddies went to the San Diego State football games, so in late 1968 John, Sherry, Linda and I drove to Pasadena for a bowl game around Christmas in the Rose Bowl.  I drove and it was after 3 a.m. when we got back to San Diego.  Linda gave me a neck rub from the back seat to keep me awake.  I think I figured out that she might be someone special.

But we saw each other at Sherry's almost every week, but I was interested in other things.  She was a nice girl and a friend.  In August 1969, Linda threw a party at her refurbished apartment in Chula Vista, but I was at King Luis' Inn and had moved several times.  Finally, a mutual friend tracked me down, and I went to her apartment, but the party was over, so I helped clean up the apartment.  

After that, we started real dating - going out to dinner, to the beach, to movies, to Charger and Aztec football games, and I figured out (finally!) that she was pretty special.  I proposed on Valentine's Day 1970 (51 years ago) and we married on 21 March 1970.  I told the proposal story in Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - A Memorable Valentine's Day!

Sherry was a lifelong friend of ours until she passed away several years ago, and John disappeared around 1970.

Fifty one years later, we are still together and huddled in our house for the past year.  We did not get to celebrate our 50th anniversary with a party or a newspaper announcement last year.  

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Copyright (c) 2021, Randall J. Seaver

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4 comments:

Linda Stufflebean said...

Here's mine - I don't think I've ever gotten SNGF done this early. https://emptybranchesonthefamilytree.com/2021/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-129/

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

Here's mine. Was going to post a photo but they are locked in "slide" mode. Someday, I need to scan them.

https://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2021/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-how-did.html

ByAPearl said...

Here's my story.

https://geneajournalsbyapearl.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/two-first-dates/

Janice M. Sellers said...

Here's my grandparents' love story, since I have not yet met the love of my life.

http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/2021/02/lily-and-abe-love-story.html