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| Wedding Day 1957 |
My mom grew up on a farm, and after graduating from high school, she and her best friend Shirley decided to spread their wings, and rented an apartment in Hutchinson, Kansas. It was a house actually, owned by a young, married, Navy couple, who had a baby. They lived on the first floor, and mom and Shirley lived upstairs.
My dad was in the military and stationed at a Navy base just two miles from Yoder, Kansas. He worked with, and befriended the man who owned this house. The friend invited my dad, Bob, over one night for dinner, to meet the two pretty young girls that lived upstairs. Clearly he was quite the matchmaker.
My mom dated the same boy, Mel, all through high school. Their families were close and I'm sure everyone thought mom and Mel would marry one day.
Enter Bob. He came over for dinner, and after meeting my mom that night, he asked her to go with him to the movies the following night. She said yes.
For their date, my mom, in an attempt to look older, more sophisticated....fancy, she called it, wore her hair up on top of her head. My dad asked her that first night,
"Do you always wear your hair up?" Which is dad speak for, "I don't like your hair that way."
In my mind I can hear her sweetly answering,
"No...not all the time. Do you like it?" to which my dad would reply with the standard answer I heard frequently growing up, that we all knew meant he didn't like something.
"It's different."
That's right, it's the answer you never wanted to hear, because it clearly, but gently, meant NO.
At the end of the night, regardless of the hairdo, my dad left his Navy leather bomber jacket with my mom. She said, she was ecstatic, because that meant she would see him again. Her room mate Shirley said, "Well, if he doesn't come back, at least you get to keep the leather jacket!" He came back.
Every night that week they saw each other. By week two he asked her to be his wife. He had bought himself a gold ring some time earlier, and he traded in his ring towards the purchase of my mom's engagement and wedding rings.
By week three, they were married.
They were wed in a private ceremony at a preacher's house. Her brother Homer and his wife Donna were there to see them married. Afterwards, they celebrated being husband and wife over a steak dinner, compliments of Homer and Donna.
That's right....three weeks is all it took. She dated a boy all through high school, met a Navy sailor, broke up with her beau, and knew in three weeks this was the love of her life.
It was the town scandal. All of her family lived in Yoder. Her parents were never told that their daughter had only known this man for three weeks. Her Aunts all said she was making a mistake, running off with this wild sailor boy, and swore the marriage would never last.
This wedding anniversary, they will have been happily married for 54 years. Her Aunts have all since passed away, but every time she saw them in the last 30 years, they would tell my mom how wrong they were about Bob. In this day and age getting married in three weeks would be considered crazy. Even in that day and age, three weeks was considered crazy. A Navy sailor marrying a small town farm girl was a scandal, but they didn't care. He was 20, she was 19 and they were in love. She took his name, Simpson, and was from that point on, no longer asked the question that haunted her during her childhood. "Was the town named after you, or were you named after the town?" She was so happy to never hear that question again.
