A Small Town Love Story

Wedding Day 1957

My mom grew up in a small Kansas town named Yoder.  Coincidentally, this was also her maiden name. Doris Yoder from Yoder, Kansas.  No, the town was not named after her family, but it's a good question none the less.  This is the story of how my mom and dad met and married in 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.
  

I'll Take What's Behind Curtain Number One

Me, two days old.

It was a special day for my family almost 40 years ago.  I am the baby of the family.  Not just the youngest by order, but the baby of babies.  My sister is 13 years older than me. My middle brother is 11 years older and my youngest brother is 8 years older. I know what you're thinking.....Oooops...I was that baby.  But according to my mom, I was the only one that was planned!  Now that's funny!
She said she and my dad were considering having another baby before she had a Tubal Ligation, and they decided to sit down with all the kids in the living room and have a family meeting.  "Let's vote!  Should we have another baby or not?"
Fortunately for me the vote was in my favor.  


So in a mid-sized Kansas town in the spring, nine months later, my brothers and sister went off to school one morning, knowing when they came home, they would have a new brother or sister.  My mom had an appointment at the hospital  to have her baby.  They were inducing labor and she was given an epidural. My dad waited outside the door, just like he did with every birth.  Not necessarily because he had a weak stomach, that's just what dads did back then.  He said he tried to watch through the small window on the hospital room door, but the nurse saw him and closed the curtain in his face.  Can you believe that?  And when he finally did get to see me, his newborn baby girl, he had a question.  You see, I looked quite Asian when I first arrived.  Just look at my picture above. My dad looked at my mom and spoke the question out loud that was burning in his mind....."Are you sure she's ours?"   


After much assurance, he drove to my brothers and sister's  schools, so he could tell my siblings the good news.  He was allowed to write a note and have it given to them in their classrooms.  My sister, who was absolutely sure she was going to have another brother, was heard screaming for joy all the way down the hallway.  


I was a healthy baby with a little Jaundice.  They gave me light therapy in the hospital, and I would have gone home after a few days, but I made a small detour.  You see, my mom was definitely ready for that Tubal Ligation now.  Four babies, two boys, two girls, all healthy, they were a happy family.  Unfortunately, the hospital she had me in was a Catholic hospital.  Why is that unfortunate you ask?  Because they did not tie tubes.  Nope, no way, wasn't going to happen.   They transfered my mom to another hospital so she could have that procedure done.  They sent me home with daddy, and daddy took me to Aunt Sylvia's house for a few days.  Aunt Sylvia is my mom's sister and amazingly she agreed to take care of  her newborn niece until my mom was released.  So my first week at home was spent at my Aunties house.    No sleep, night time feedings, crying baby; my Aunt took care of it all my very first week in this world.  Now that's sisterly love.   
Hopefully she didn't close the curtain on my dad when he tried to look through the window.   

Stories

Grandma- Early Years

Stories......we all have them. Our lives are full of stories that make us who we are. Just this morning I'm lying in bed and I got this overwhelming urge to blog my stories. Not for the world......for my kids. My parents are both in their early 70's. And I feel like I haven't gotten the whole story, not near enough by any means. My mom and I talked about putting a scrapbook together of all her old black and whites. Boxes of photos of unknown people staring up at me. Boxes of photos of their early married life, the grandparents I never met, and my brothers and sister when we were young. My parents have been married for 54 years. They have decades of memories in those boxes. I told my mom I could place them, decorate the page and glue them down, but she's the one who has to tell the stories, or they'll all be lost with her. I've asked many times over the last few years,

"Have you labeled those photos yet. Have you written the descriptions on the pictures?"

"No, I'm just so busy," she says, "and I have lousy handwriting."

"Write on the back, Mom, nobody will see it but me. You have to tell the stories."

There's so much to be said, to be learned from them, and I feel like I'm running out of time. All of those pictures left unlabeled. All of the history left unknown. All of the stories left untold. But when we do visit, there's so much to talk about in the here and now, that the past rarely comes up in conversation. This is something I will need to work on over the coming years, before it's too late for me to finish those chapters.

But for me, for my kids, and my future grand-kids, I'd like to start now. So I'll tell my stories, from the very beginning, so one day my kids will have it all written down. I won't even have to worry about my lousy handwriting. I'll have it all neatly typed in this blog for them to read. They won't be extraordinary stories to anyone else, but to my kids they'll be a time capsule. A little glimpse into their mom's past, so they'll know all about my childhood, their grandparents, my adventures, my thoughts, my decisions and my dreams. So I'll be my children's historian. And the story will start; Once upon a time.........on a Thursday morning in springtime, a little baby girl was born.


~ Mondays child is fair of face,
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay. ~