I decided to make a separate section for my time in Minnesota going to college, even though it is a virtual blip in the midst of my time in Illinois. That is also the place where I met my wife, which I suppose might lend itself to some stories on its own. Hopefully you have already read the Illinois section through high school graduation and the move to Quincy. At the end of summer my dad said he would accompany me up on the car ride to help me get situated. I had heard his stories of his time at Bible College and I was happy to let him tag along. I packed up the boxes of clothes and such in the trunk of the 1972 Pontiac Grand Ville and we headed north to North Central Bible College (NCBC). Upon arriving, my dad was not amused at the room situation, what with holes in the walls and ceiling and run-down furniture. He also was not pleased that they were now charging to park in the parking deck when they had said there would be no cost at the banquets. But he said it's not about the accomodations but the education. The school gave some suggestions for job openings and I was hired to clean offices after just two or three interviews. Those were the days you could walk in, talk to somebody, and get hired on the spot. After dad was sure I could survive on my own I drove him to the Minneapolis Airport and he flew back to Illinois.
One of the first things I remember as freshman year began was all the talk about the Swine Flu Virus. This had started at the beginning of 1976 and the government was trying to do a mass vaccination on the nation and the nation wasn't having it. Shades of COVID 2019 for sure. Anyways I had no problem with it and went in a got my shot and that was that. While I know I received some vaccinations as a child and maybe even into my teens, this was me going in to get it. I took this photo from our yearbook and the scene looks remarkably like the one in the online Smithsonian Magazine article about this:
The vaccination gun is the same and the doctor is in the same position holding the arm the same. There must have been an orientation video to all involved. It's an interesting article though I can't claim to have remembered any of that mentioned by the writer. But the vaccination event on campus did get an entire page in the yearbook.
I ended up assigned to a double room on the fifth floor of the men's dorm, the highest floor in the building. It was an old hospital at one time so the rooms were all randomly sized and that size determined how many guys they would cram in a room. The room was probably no more than 10x10 with a couple of beds, dressers, and chairs. There might have been a closet. I got the bunk under the holes in the ceiling and walls. My roommate was my friend from church while we were in Joliet. Several from Joliet ended up going at the same time. The cafeteria was down in the basement of the men's dorm so that was easier for us during winter. Otherwise, the chapel and the girl's dorm was across the street on the corners, so that the three buildings took three corners of the intersection with the fourth (to the right out of frame below) being Elliot Park. Gym class, such as it was, took place over there. The tall building in the background is the IDS tower.
My job was in downtown Minneapolis, in a bank building a couple blocks from the IDS tower. I had several floors of the building to do floor cleaning and garbage collection from the offices and we had to haul it down to the garbage floor. Certain offices that had sensitive bank business required that we collect their garbage, tag it with the floor and room, and then put it down in lockup on the garbage floor. We held on to it for two weeks before eventually throwing it in the dumpster, but that gave some time to retrieve items that were accidentally thrown away. I had to retrieve those bags numerous times. I also had a friend from college who worked in the bank on the main level and one day he opened up the computer room and I got to see those monstrous servers with the reels of magnetic tape constantly spinning. That was 1976 and I thought that was awesome. It would only be five more years until the IBM PC debuted to the world.
I didn't give a whole lot of thought to the classes that were assigned to me for that first semester, or for the first year for that matter. I figured it was like high school where you didn't have much choice. Yes, there were many of those classes that were prerequisites that needed to be taken before certain other classes. But if I knew then what I figured out by the end of that first school year, I might have stayed in Quincy to get the general courses out of the way first and then start sophomore year here. As it was, when I came back to Minneapolis after the sophomore year in Quincy, I was treated as a freshman with no regards to my junior status. But nonetheless that freshman year was intense. I started class at 7:30 am with the last class ending around 3:00 pm. Dinner was at 5:00 pm and then work started at 7:00 pm lasting through midnight. I had been assigned 35 credits that first year and every one of those classes had term papers to be written and I remember there being about 20 papers to write that first year. One professor in particular, a first year professor, assigned 60-page term papers in each of his classes and I had him in more than one class. I understood that he reduced that number to 30 pages the next year (my year in Quincy) and then just 20 pages in his third year. I was thankful I missed the year of 40-page papers but it might have been even nicer to miss the 60-page year. As an aside, the yearbook gave a special mention to the professor of the class, making mention of his 20-year term papers and how that was better than the 30-page papers, but made no mention of the 60-page tome we had to deal with. The writer of that caption must have been younger as anyone who was there for teacher's first year could never forget all those 60 pages.
Manual typewriter
And what did I have to type out those 60-page term papers? You got it, a manual typewriter. I think my mom used it at home now and then but sent it with me since I would be needing one. Those who didn't have a typewriter ended up having to find someone to type it for them, at a price of course. The cloth ribbon was so worn that I got a bottle of ink to soak into the cloth layers. Needed to bold a word? You just backed up and hit the letters several times each really hard. Made a mistake? You had to erase without ripping a hole in the paper. I learned about white-out later. Almost 50 years later we offer "keyboarding" classes in school, learn to use fonts and colors and graphics, crank out pages that can be corrected immediately on a screen, and print off perfect paper copies on a laser printer that could be mistaken for an actual printed book. And to think my life has seen all those steps from typewriter to computers. It's amazing when such shifts take place in only a partial lifetime.
Around Thanksgiving time I found I wouldn't be given time off from my job until Christmas so I was stranded at the dorm while most everyone else headed home. Life with my roommate was going downhill because of his new friends and the guitar jam sessions that stretched into the early hours of the morning. I discovered that there was an empty room on the other side of the fifth floor, mostly because we all roamed the halls and knew who lived where. It was a single room, which was rare in this old building, and I couldn't imagine why it hadn't been snapped up yet. I check with the school office and they gave me permission to move into the room. I told my former roommate when he got back.
I did not have a girlfriend that first year, nor did I even talk with a girl that I can remember. That hadn't been a thing yet as I was mostly afraid of them. In looking through the yearbook from that first year, I only recognize six faces and they were all guys from our floor. In alphabetical order they were Steve Brandt, Dale Eytzen, Jerry Hunt, Wade Laszlo, Mark Ohms, and Tim Newman. There were thirteen different notations in the yearbook that I was able to hunt down on the last days of school, so there were at least thirteen people I felt comfortable enough asking to sign my yearbook. Again, no girls. I pretty much kept to myself in between going to classes, dinner, and work. I went to church on Sundays with others who waited for a church bus to come and bring us there and back. My car sat up on the top level of the parking lot except for work, as it was a finnicky car and I didn't want it to break down with a car full of students. When it did break down I always seemed to be far from school and it took all day to get back. Those were the days of regular spark plugs, points-style distributors, finnicky carburetors with chokes, three speed transmissions, and bias ply tires. We were kids at school and happy to have a car, but the car wasn't always happy and didn't feel like starting or running at any given time. Nowadays you jump in the car, start the engine, and take off down the road. In the "good old days" there was a whole process you had to go through to start your old car that sometimes involved holding your tongue the right way. Going through those experiences makes you appreciate the very capable vehicles we drive today.
The once-ubiquitous payphoneSpeaking of the good old days the phone situation was quite different than what we have today. There was one pay phone on each floor that seemed to be in use constantly since there were quite a few of us up on fifth floor. When it rang it was expected that the one closest to the phone would answer and hunt down the person asked for at the other end. Calling out was another thing entirely. You had to be sure to have your supply of quarters handy (you also needed them for laundry) to plunk into the phone whenever the operator came on to tell you to "add six more quarters for ten more minutes or hang up the phone" or however much it cost back then, but you were adding quarters a lot. My dad was in the hospital during that first year and I remember going through a bunch of quarters to catch up on how he was doing. Most of the time, though, if you needed to make a call to family you would call your home landline and ask for "Charlie Smith" or some other person you both knew but wasn't in your family. The one who answered would say he wasn't in and to call back later. You would hang up the phone and ten seconds later they would call you back from their landline as they had your floor phone on speed dial. It was far cheaper for them to call you back than to keep putting quarters in the phone. Once again technology has spoiled us as we just make a call without any thought to cost. Long distance is not what it used to be.
Ellen helped me through collegeIt was nice to get home for Christmas and spend a few days with the family and eating good food. The school cafeteria had not been the greatest and their system for the food plan was for students to purchase a book of stamps at a discount and then use them to pay for the items you chose. This a la carte system meant you usually ate more and so it cost you more, so I tried to make it last longer by choosing less. The down side of the food plan that year was no service on Saturday and Sunday, so you were on your ownd those days. My solution was unique. On Saturday when I got up I headed to the local Smorgasbord, which was the precursor to the present buffets and all-you-can-eat restaurants (if you can even find one anymore). It cost me $1.99 to eat all you could and I often stayed there between one and two hours. I ate between 8 and 10 plates of food usually aiming to eat as much meat as possible. That carried me through to Monday morning where I grabbed a full breakfast. That plan helped me save a bunch of money. I had regular payments to make to the school billing office with my part-time job income so there was always the pressure to make enough. I did have a nice little old lady from the church in Joliet who had decided she'd like to help me through my school years with $1,000 a year or $500 a semester. I always appreciated that and I wouldn't have made it otherwise. I had driven her to church and back home on Sundays over the course of a year or so and that was her way of thanking me. I first met her when she was 85 years old and she died at the age of 101, which I noted at the funeral.
Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis
On the weekends, every so often, I would head to Minnehaha Park as it was a beautiful setting in the middle of the city, especially in the springtime. I would visit the Mississippi River as it was a short walk away. There was a waterfall in the park, Minnehaha Falls, and it was relaxing to walk around and see it all. I investigated places here and there, like an indoor Arboretum with all kinds of amazing flowers. Had I been a bit more outgoing I might had made it to be a part of the yearbook photographer crew but that would have to wait until my junior year. All in all I don't seem to have taken a ton of photos from my time at college, but I did get out in spurts. I brought my camera to work one night as I had met up with an employee who had the key to the roof of the bank building, about 26 stories up or thereabouts. That was probably the first time I was on top of a building that high and I had to document it. Also, cameras and film were a whole different animal than the cell phone cameras we all carry today.
Minneapolis at night from the top of the bank buildingI made it to the end of the second semester with all my tests completed and my term papers turned in, and I ended up with 6 A's, 6 B's, and one lousy C for a GPA of 3.34 for the year. Not great, just average as college is not high school. To be quite honest I haven't once thought about my grades after finishing freshman year, not until I dug out my official transcript, and the subject of my grades never came up ever in my life. Actually I "remembered" doing better than that but numbers don't lie and it is what it is and all of that. The last few days of school centered around getting people to sign your yearbook and I had quite the time just finding 13 people who I thought might actually sign it. One of the final conversations I had was with a tall guy who might have spent high school being the team quarter back, though I don't remember interacting with him during the school year and I couldn't remember his face if my life depended on it. I gave him the obligatory "see you next year" and instead of him giving a wave and moving on he stopped and told me he wasn't coming back the next year. That struck me as odd since he was a model student and I couldn't imagine why he'd stay away so I asked him to explain. He told me he was planning to attend his local community college for all the core classes that weren't ministry related. He said it was so much cheaper than NCBC's tuition rates, nevermind that they were lower than other schools. He felt the professors would do a better job of teaching those classes and better prepare him in those areas, and he also mentioned that so many students here disliked those core classes when taken at NCBC. All I could say was "huh" and probably something about how I'd have to check into that when I get back home. The idea certainly made an impression on me and I thought about it on the drive back.
(Break 3 - Thus ends my first year of college and my first college year in Minneapolis. If you are reading this chronologically you can return back to the Illinois section where you left off at Break 2 and continue the saga through the summer of 1977, my sophomore year in college, and the summer of 1978. Then come on back here to finish up junior and senior year in Minneapolis.)
I was back. I had thoroughly enjoyed my year in Quincy but I was ready to finish the last half of my college education. I was a Junior, no longer a freshman, and that would give me some cred. Except that it didn't. I found out quickly that I was placed in with the incoming freshman class and had to start over. Not what I wanted to hear. They immediately told us of a picnic in Minnehaha Park for all the "freshmen" but all I remember hearing was free food. Someone finally recognized me as a junior, someone who worked taking pictures for the yearbook, and they gave me a couple rolls of color film and asked if I'd take photos of the event. It was a beautiful day for a picnic in the park and I got some great shots. It was an honor to be given the chance to take color photos as most were taken in black and white, especially in the yearbook. There was this one guy who seemed to be the life of the party in the park and I got one of him dropping leaves on a participating girl while actually catching the leaves in midair. Again, this is easy to do on phones and cameras now but back then all I had was a manual 35mm Yashica with a button for one photo at a time. I also did a time-release photo of the campus at night with a 15 or 20 second exposure holding that shutter release open. Both those photos made it into the yearbook (the two color photos below) along with 28 more and I drew a red box around all my photos in the yearbook so I would remember some day. Seems like "some day" is here as I write this.
Fun in the Park
Orientation was not needed, that's for sure. I could have done it myself but I held my tongue as our group of eight gathered. The one thing we all had in common is that our last name started with an "A." All I remember from that orientation is that I actually got up the nerve to ask one of the freshman girls out on a date, though I don't think either of us thought it went all that well. Later in the year I asked a girl if she would go with me to help me at the Winter Banquet taking photos and she agreed as long as we didn't call it a date. So I guess that didn't go well either. A girl asked me out for Sadie Hawkins day and it was a double date with my next door neighbor Mark and his girlfriend, but no spark there as well. There was a girl I sat next to in one of my classes and I always complimented her on her drawings but for some reason never thought to ask her out. You could say I was oblivious. I actually stopped a girl walking by outside and asked her for a date but she just laughed. I guess that was a no. And let's not forget the girl I took on a date in which the first thing she told me at the restaurant was that she was already dating another guy. Awkward. As far as I can remember that was the complete list of my unsuccessful dates at NCBC. I had better luck during my sophomore year in Quincy where I dated a girl for about three months. At least I knew it was possible.
Photographer for the Banquet ("not my date" to the right)But what I really needed at the moment was to find the dorm room I had been assigned. Surely they had thought to put me back up on the fifth floor where everybody knew my name, but no, I was placed on a floor with the freshmen and in a room of four or six guys or maybe it was twelve. I don't quite remember the specific number but what I do remember was that I was not doing a group warehouse arrangement. So I found the guy with the clipboard and the paperwork of all the room assignments on each floor, and I asked to see the fifth floor. He said all the rooms were filled, none left, sorry. I looked at the paper and asked him about the room next to the elevator which seemed to be empty. He said nobody could get into that room because the key didn't fit, but gave me the key and said I could have the room if I could get in. He must have thought he could have some fun with one of the new freshmen. What I knew and he didn't was that there was a back way into that room, left off the elevator and past the wall phone and into the little back hallway. Perhaps the key worked in that lock. I took the elevator up to the fifth floor, did the loop-dee-loop around the phone, headed down the hallway and held my breath as I put the key in the lock. I got the last laugh as the door opened straight away. I had been in that room before while it was occupied my freshman year but I hadn't seen the second closet and the way out the back. I went down and told the guy I was good to go, no problem with the door. I took the key and the hallway door lock (which had no dey at all) to a locksmith and asked him to key the lock to the key I now had, making it possible to get in either door. I lasted most of the first semester before the RA caught on and they changed the lock back so it worked for both of us. I hadn't had a room inspection in all that time. It was good while it lasted.
Nighttime in the CityOn the other side of the bedroom was a large deep closet and another odd-shaped room that I used for storage. This was the room that I initially use to get inside the room, though now the key didn't work so I couldn't go out the back way. Right near the front door to the hallway was a small 3x3 entryway with an old-style set of shelves with doors that closed over them. Across from that was the pièce de résistance--my own very small bathroom! There was just one large bathroom with showers on the fifth floor among a lot of guys. I still had to use that bathroom for showers but the small wall sink and accompanying toilet was a godsend. Just as I was getting used to that room we were told that our wing would have to relocate while the rooms were remodeled. They were paneling the walls, fixing the ceiling, and carpeting the floors. When I talked to the guy who started the project I found out they were also planning on taking out the doors between rooms and were getting rid of the extra closet room, the shelves, and the bathroom. Horrors! I begged, literally begged, for him to leave everything as is except the extra doors between my room and the one next door. I understood that for privacy. I don't know if he got permission from the school or if he just decided to do a guy a favor but I ended up with all those features intact. That room was the bomb for my final two years. I found out years later that an RA took over that room after I left.
There was a wall near the school offices that had all kinds of signs offering jobs, some especially to NCBC students as they were generally good workers. I showed up at one of those offerings and found out it was basically a call center where they gave me a page of numbers to call and try to sign the owner of the home up to receive a quote for aluminum siding. We would get $30 for each one who said yes. Over two nights I had just two who agreed to have someone come to their home and give a quote. Other than those two people who seemed to want the quote, everyone else I talked to yelled, screamed, cursed, and swore before slamming their phone down. I never showed up to that job after the second night. I did get my $60 though. You have to have a real thick skin for that. I found another job on the board for a driver through a company called Courier Dispatch. We drove the old-style panel vans around the city and picked up mail sacks for companies who were mailing off their bills or anything like that. Sometimes we had mail to deliver to them. The bags were heavy and we had stairs to deal with but for the most part I was alone in my thoughts as I drove. I was good at that job and the boss asked me to fill in for others numerous times. Extra money.
As for my classes, they were now all biblical studies so I understood them a lot more than the general classes. As I heard numerous students mention how terrible the general courses were at NCBC I smiled to myself as I remembered my enjoyable time back in Quincy. I was still cranking out my term papers on the old manual typewriter but I didn't have but a few to do, and that was with 14 classes for junior year instead of the 13 for freshman year. I remained an average college student with 4 A's and 10 B's for that third years which surely must have been a disappointment for my parents.
Down in the basement of the men's dorm, at the other end from the cafeteria was a ping-pong table, and game room with a pool table and a foosball table, as well as a TV room. The TV room was not particularly large, maybe 12x12, with a console TV at one end and everyone crammed into the room sitting on the floor. There was a group of guys who met down in the TV room at 5:00 pm every night to watch "Hogan's Heroes." That gave a half hour for the rush that always gathered at the cafeteria at that time when it opened. When "Mork and Mindy" took the TV world by storm the room was filled with like-minded students who all came to watch it at 7:00 pm on Thursday evenings. If a couple people were watching something else when the crowd came in, the channel was changed to please the crowd. Those were the two shows that I would watch in the TV room, otherwise there wasn't much on. I also got good at ping pong so I got to play a bunch, and I also got good at foosball as the guy with the key asked me to play whenever he was around, and we won most of the time. I never did play the pool table. That was until the fateful day a little blonde girl waltzed into my life.
It all started at the pool table
She told me later that she used to watch me sitting in the corner of the TV room near the little fake fireplace (it gave off a little heat from the bulb. It was February 1979 in Minnesota and it was cold. Really cold. Unbelievably cold She would be sitting with her boyfriend on the other side of the room though I never noticed her. She said she would look over and see me sitting there and said a light was shining down on me, with angels up above looking down on me. Okay, I made that last part up, but I mention it bacause there was no light up above. I'm guessing it was the fireplace somehow lighting me up, but whatever it was she thought I was cute and she decided that she would search me out it she ever broke up with her boyfriend. Apparently she was also watching me elsewhere as she said she liked me in the tight black pair of Angels Flight bell-bottom pants. Those pants had no effect on any other girl that I can remember, but one Thursday night this little blonde comes up to me after a TV show ended in the TV room. She saw me in there and she and the boyfriend had broken up so she was on the hunt for the guy in the corner of the room with the light shining on him. She asked if I'd like to play a game of pool and I said yes. She says she let me win, but I wasn't really focused on the game anyway. Afterwards we spent some time talking with each other and I'm sure she was hoping I would ask her out for the weekend and see where this might go. Except there was a pre-existing engagement on the upcoming weekend. I had to work Friday night, and after work was done I was driving home in the 1972 Pontiac Grand Ville and buying my dad's car which was a 1978 Buick Limited. I had told him to give me the first chance to buy it whenever he planned to trade it in and this was the time. I told the little blonde, whose name was Kathy, that I would be back Sunday night and would find her and plan a time to take her out.
Chose the car over the girlUnbeknownst to me the little blonde was not happy. She had expected me to jump at the chance to take her on a date right then and there. So over the weekend she got back with the boyfriend so she wouldn't look like a loser without a date on the weekend. (For the purposes of this story I asked her about this and she said I had absolutely not told her about the car or she wouldn't have gotten back together with the boyfriend. Agree to disagree. We'll have to ask God about it someday). Come that Monday I searched for her but she just told me she had gone back with the boyfriend so that was that as far as I was concerned. But then, the next day, she broke up with said boyfriend and sent her roommate to find me and broker a truce between us so I would ask her out. This was especially awkward when the roommate discovered I was the guy she sat next to in class making drawings to show me that she was hoping I would ask her out and she went back to discuss that conundrum with Kathy. There seem to be a whole lot of rules between girls about girlfriend/boyfriend relationships but the roommate said she had met another guy and Kathy should pursue me. Roommate came back to find me the day after and I told her I wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue Kathy but she must have been very persuasive because I ended up finding the little blonde and asking her out for the Saturday concert at the chapel. And then I asked out the next Saturday for another concert. And the rest, as they say, is history. We dated for the next three months and then the school year was over. I drove her to her home with all her possessions and I got to meet the family. I would visit a couple months after that to ask her to marry me and she said yes. It was a five month courtship of sorts and we were engaged.
I don't remember exactly when the yearbooks came out but it was near the very end of the school year, either before or after. In conversation she mentioned how she was upset at the bozo photographer who took all these photos of her ex-fiance and how a picture of him dumping leaves on a girl was right next to a picture of the ex-boyfriend. She was not amused when she found out it was me, as who was I to know that the life of the party at the Freshmen Picnic was her ex-fiance. Even so she still agreed to marry me. We wrote a lot over the summer, most every day. We called on the weekends, she calling me one weekend and me calling her the next. We limited ourselves to a half hour call which cost about $20 at the time. If only cell phones had been invented by this time. She came down to visit me for a week in Springfield, Illinois where my parents had moved while I was still at school.
As the end of the summer approached we met each other back at NCBC. Though the true name for that acronym was North Central Bible College it was affectionately called North Central Bridal College by many because of all the couples who met there and got married. We planned for a June 1980 wedding after I graduated, though we toyed with the idea of getting married earlier. Friends all around us were getting married and moving to an apartment to the peer pressure was pretty high but it did make more sense to wait. I got my room back on the 5th floor for my final year and she went back to her previous corner on the second floor of the girl's dorm with some of the same friends. Right off the bat I explained my financial situation where all my money went to school expenses, car payment, and dates with her. I really didn't have much excess funds even though I had the nicest car in the school and it might have seemed to some people that I was loaded. So we agreed to be selective in our dates out together as I think you are always dating until you are married.
Keying in Punch CardsFor the first semester Kathy got a job as a card punch operator and I went back to Courier Dispatch but in the afternoon instead of the night shift. I also was on-call this time intead of driving set routes. The dispatcher would keep track of where the on-call drivers were and gave assignments to the closest driver. We would go to one address to pick up something and bring it to another address to drop off. We had a book the size of a bible with all the street names in the city and we had to look up most every trip. We might have to carry a letter or we might be carrying boxes, it was always different. Sounds a bit like the Lyft gig I had when nearing retirement, although we used our cell phones to find the closest drive and plot the course. And we were picking up people to bring them from one place to another. Nonetheless, my very last day of driving for them consisted of an entire day of moving office and bedroom furniture to another location, probably the worst day ever of that particular job.
For the first semester of my senior year I took only four classes while needing only three classes for the second semester. For those seven courses I received four A's and three B's which added to my average status. Classes ended for both of us at noon which gave us time to have lunch together and then head for work. We both started at 1:00 pm so I would drop her off first and then head to my job. We both got off at five though sometimes the schedule changed for me and I got off a little later. In those cases I would stop by and pick her up in the Courier Dispatch van and drop her off at the school before finishing up my route and going back to get my car. We'd spend each evening together so we definitely had a chance to talk and get to know each other better. We each went to our respective homes for Christmas and then came back to start the second semester. Since we were a couple now I had someone to take to the Winter Banquet and we both dressed up for the event. If I remember I still took the couples photos but that was before it started. At the Spring Banquet I think she talked me into letting someone else do it and give her all my attention. Or something like that. I was beginning to see there was more to this marriage thing than I was aware.
As we inched closer to Valentine's Day I realized this would be our first Valentine's together. The Thursday she bopped into my life the year before was February 15, 1979 which was the day after Valentine's Day so I guess I had to think of something for this one. Fortunately for me I was the recipient of a Valentine phenomenon. I won a contest. Not just any contest but a Valentine's Day contest. All I had to do was send in my name and a few weeks later I was informed I was the winner. There's a good chance there weren't many who entered.We always say it never happens to us but this time it did. I did two of the prize items before Valentine's Day. The roses came delivered to the girls dorm in a long box with a dozen huge long-stemmed red roses and some fancy baby's breath. I heard about it later since guys were not welcome at the girl's dorm at night. When flowers got delivered there a bunch of girls would all run down and see who it was for. When they called Kathy down she was shocked that they were for her. She said it was nice to be that girl at college for at least one night. The other "prize" was a personalized song by a musical person who called a few days before and asked for a few details to put in the song. Kathy was so embarassed about that one. If it had happened today you could be sure that someone would have made a video to embarass her for years to come. I was working or I would have at least gotten a picture. At the time she said he was a clown and for the past 45 year I've imagined Bozo in big shoes showing up with a toy guitar. I just found out today, as I write this story, that she meant one of the other definitions of a clown: "a comic performer, as in a circus, theatrical production, or the like, who wears an outlandish costume and makeup and entertains by pantomiming common situations or actions in exaggerated or ridiculous fashion, by juggling or tumbling, etc." Well color me foolish.
At least she liked these
She was now mad at me since I was spending money on her after I had told her I had little money, so I told her about winning the contest. That made her feel a little better but she still didn't like the clown. The other two prizes were set for Valentine's Day 1979. There was dinner at the Camelot Restaurant with the $50 certificate. That may not sound like much but we had appetizers, soup, a salad, a great entree, drinks, and dessert for about $34. We gave the rest to the server as a tip, but the restaurant returned the money after taking out what they considered a reasonable tip. I don't think that should have been their business as it was our gift certificate, but we never did go back to spend the rest since they treated us so poorly the first time. We were seated near the kitchen with all the traffic, they looked down their noses at us like we were nobodies, and did pretty much all the memes you see on a poor restaurant experience. Next up was the theater play of Romeo and Juliet at the Guthrie Theater. We had third row seats right up close and it was a new experience for both of us though she wasn't a big fan of the experience. Kathy says both of these were done on Valentine's Day which must have been easier back then. It's almost impossible for a normal person to get a reservation for that day now. I should add that there was a fifth item that was mentioned on the radio while the station was promoting the Valentine's Day gift package, which was a college of records with love songs. They never did show up, she said she didn't care, so I never contacted the station.
Wedding Day
The rest of the school year went quickly as she planned the wedding in Upper Michagan, which was to be a simple affair. When the school year ended both myself and my future brother-in-law both graduating from NCBC together. My parents and her parents came to graduation and that was probably their first time meeting. After graduation Kathy went back with her parents and I stayed with my brother-in-law and my wife's sister in Minneapolis. I kept working at Courier Dispatch for six weeks full-time which gave me nearly $1,000 to start married life together. So when I drove to Kathy's home for the wedding the day had been all planned. Nobody asked for my input so I assumed I didn't get a say in it. (I figured with all the incorrect remembrances attributed to me that I should ask her why she never let me have a choice in anything. She went ballistic and said I insisted on wearing all white after she told me she wanted me in a black tux. But that's still only one thing.) The church had been decorated by Kathy's uncle. There was room for about 250 in the sanctuary but 300 showed up and they squeezed in. It was much different than today as weddings used to be just a simple gathering. Her mom spent about $300 for the wedding dress, photographer, flowers, and cake. Her pastor and my dad (also a pastor) did the ceremony. The people went to the church fellowship hall after the ceremony and people brought food like a church potluck. There was not enough food there for everyone so we just went around and chatted with all the people who came, some from great distances. I didn't even get a piece of the groom's chocolate cake. After folks were leaving at a slow trickle it was time for us to head out for our honeymoon. About that, I spent a couple days installing a radio in my brother's car before we headed down to Missouri. She's never forgiven me for that either.
(Break 4 - Head back to where you came from in the Illinois page which was Break 3. You are now on target ("Stay on target! Stay on target!") to finish the Illinois years.
Later,
Arktander
(aka David Andreasen)
