REFLECTIONS OF A LIFE, Chapter 6: Dorothy

Chapter 6

Dorothy

            I was nearing my mid-thirties, and had almost given up finding a soulmate.  The Twin Cities provided more opportunities to meet women than anyplace I had ever lived.  There were several Catholic singles organizations that Virgil and I went to regularly, and we did some dating, but neither of us seemed able to meet the right person.

            I beat Virgil by several years in finding the love of my life.  I met her at a party of one of the singles groups.  Dorothy was slender, dark haired, with an elfin face and enchanting bone structure.  (I still like to call her a sylph, but she chides me on this.)  She was a year younger, and for quite a few years I would tease her that she was just a "kid".  Now I can no longer get away with that. 

            I don't remember whether someone introduced us or whether I saw her across a crowded room, was immediately intrigued, and aggressively elbowed my way to her side.  Whichever it was, I think we both knew this might well be the real thing.  She was quiet and unassuming, just like myself, and was a public health nurse and this suggested a compassionate and empathetic person.  Also it suggested a person much like myself who was striving to make the most of herself through education.  I learned she had some years after getting her RN from St. Catherine's in St. Paul gone back to school in Milwaukee to get a baccalaureate degree from Marquette in Public Health Nursing.  

            I must have taken her hand during that evening for I marveled that it was like mine, slender with long fingers.  So I guess our attraction was reinforced by compatibility.  But we certainly had one incompatibility:  she was from a large family and a northern Wisconsin farm, and I was an only child living most of my life in Des Moines, and small towns before that. 

            I don't remember whether I took her home that night.  I think she came with some girls and probably went back with them.  But I wasn't going to let her escape without making plans to see each other again.         

            Next Saturday I took her to a nightclub where we could dance to quiet music and talk without deafening noise.  I told her about my job at Dayton's, and how I expected to be a buyer in a few years.  But I also told her I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life in retailing, that I was studying for an MBA at night at the University of Minnesota, and might someday want to go for a Ph.D.  Such career uncertainties in a man my age would hardly bedazzle a maiden looking for a man with more certain prospects, but she didn't seem dissuaded.

            I couldn't keep her out of my mind, and wanted to be with her all the time.  More of a problem was my mother.  Neither Dorothy nor I could accept the idea of my mother living with us.  And it turned out to be mutual with all parties:  my mother didn't want to live with us either.  But I still needed to contribute to her support on rather meager income.

            Things worked out, although our wedding plans were delayed longer than would otherwise have been the case.  After we were married, Mom got a small apartment in Minneapolis and we dutifully saw her and encouraged her going to one of the senior centers nearby.  At first she balked, but soon found the social life far better than she had expected, a vast improvement over living with me.  Then that first winter her brother Pete and his wife persuaded her to go south with them to McAllen, Texas.  They had been going there for some years and thought she would like the warm climate after the frigid Minnesota winters.  This town of 30,000 on the Rio Grande had become a mecca for snowbirds from the upper Midwest, and social activities abounded.

            Having no brothers and sisters (I had two half-sisters much younger than myself who lived with Dad in Kansas), it was nice to become involved with Dorothy's family.  At that time, two of her sisters and their families lived around the Twin Cities, as did her younger sister, Joan.  One brother, Jim, lived with the parents on the farm.  There were also a few other relatives to visit in the vicinity.

            We often drove to the farm, it being only 120 miles from Minneapolis between Bruce and Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and was about 100 miles from Lake Superior.  Now I became intrigued with this northern Wisconsin country.  It did not have the treelessness and big sky of western Kansas and Dakota, but the land had character and emptiness of its own.  In some ways it was a bleakness—second-growth scrub conifers with lakes glistening through the trees, scattered farms resting on cleared land wrested from the trees, often with weathered buildings reflecting farming on marginal land. 

            The view from the gravel road in front of their house stretched west toward a thin line of blue against the horizon—the Blue Hills we called them, but officially they were the Barron Hills.  The road made a bend a half mile away, and the land sloped gently to the Chippewa River three miles beyond.  The Chippewa was more than a creek but only a junior river so close to its source.  This was a land of short-growing seasons, glaciated without the deep black loam of farther south.  Dairy farming predominated, with corn and hay being major crops. 

            I became convinced that dairy farming was the hardest kind of farming.  Cows had to be milked early morning and evening, every day, and their quarters cleaned and fresh hay provided.  Toil was unending, with never a day off.  But the milk did provide regular income unlike other kinds of farming, such as wheat, dependent on the harvest for income.

            I delighted in walking the fields, being careful not to step on cow pods, but I enjoyed more the gravel road, later to become black-topped, and even developed some skill with throwing stones at telephone poles and crows and other critters.

            I took an instant liking to Dorothy's parents.  I could see that Dorothy got her good bone structure from her mother, Emma.  Her father, Carl, was white haired and still a handsome man even into his eighties.  At a time when college schooling was rare in rural communities, both parents had gone to college, Carl to a business school and Emma to a teachers' college.  His migraines led to their moving from Chicago up to northern Wisconsin and the farming life that theoretically was less stressful.  Again, most unusual in farm families of the day, three of the five daughters went to college.

            Brother Jim, who now did most of the work on the farm, was thin almost to the point of emaciation.  He had a scar on his forehead where he'd been kicked by a cow when a boy.  Maybe this led to his epilepsy, which plagued him the rest of his life.  His twin sister, Joyce, was valedictorian and graduated from nursing school at the top of her class.

            The house was not a great source of comfort, especially in summer, when it could get almost unbearably hot in the upstairs bedroom, and winters were the other extreme.  My allergies that did not bother much in the city became worse with the open windows and profusion of pollen.  But in comparing it to the farm in Dakota that I knew as a boy  thirty years before, it was a vast improvement.  Electricity had come during the war, and an indoor bathroom was put in some years before I met Dorothy.  Still, I stayed away from the hayloft.

            About two miles away was the one-room schoolhouse where her mother had taught for eight years and where Dorothy and her siblings walked to school, often taking shortcuts through the woods, and more than once startling a bear and being chased.  Wow!  My wife certainly had a far more adventurous childhood than I did.

            The wedding and honeymoon. --We finally got married June 30, 1962 at Incarnation Catholic Church in Minneapolis.  I knew Dorothy was getting impatient for me to make the formal commitment, but in truth I was concerned about the burden of my mother and whether economically we could swing it.  I guess I was unduly pessimistic for Dorothy had a good job, but I was still in the low-paying throes of retailing.  Things began looking up in the spring of 1962 when I was offered the Target opportunity, and we quickly made wedding plans.  I had also finished the MBA, the first person to complete this recently established night graduate program designed for part-time students.  Thus another financial drain was removed, since I had had to foot the full costs of tuition unlike almost all my classmates who had their graduate tuition paid by employers.

            Virgil was my best man, and Dorothy's brother Jim was an usher.  My calmness amazed me now that the decision was made, and I got through the ceremony in good shape.  I had no qualms.  I wonder whether Dorothy had any.  She never told me.   

            For our honeymoon we were driving to Denver and the mountains.  In all the traveling with my mother we had never made reservations for lodging, and never had any problems getting a room.  So I didn't bother to make reservations for our wedding night.  We planned to drive to Sioux Falls, South Dakota that first night, about 250 miles, which would get us there in plenty of time for dinner.  But we found that all the decent motels had no vacancies; it was the peak travel season for going out west, and motels in those days were not as plentiful as today.  With Sioux Falls the largest city in the state, finding suitable lodging within reasonable distance farther on seemed unlikely.  

            "How could you not make a reservation for our wedding night?" my bride quietly observed, trying to keep her voice from rising.

            I squirmed.  "I never had trouble getting into a motel before," I managed to say.

            Well, we did find a room at the old downtown hotel, had a forgettable meal, and found a grocery store where we were able to buy a bottle of champagne, the pink stuff, they didn't have the other.  So after this sorry meal we toasted ourselves in our room with pink champagne.

            We spent the second night in a small town in western Nebraska, also hardly memorable, then the next night in a hotel in Denver.  From there we saw the major sights of the city, then went on a tour of the Coors Brewery in Golden, a suburb on the edge of the mountains.  We spent the last few nights at an inn at Evergreen, deep in the mountains, but a place I had been to several times on my visits with Dad and his family.

            The first night at Evergreen, we went to a recommended restaurant at the top of a pass twenty miles away.  We got there about 9:00 already hungry, but the place was so crowded we had to wait until after ten to be served.  With the mountain air and the lateness of the hour we both were famished, and the prime rib was huge.  We gorged ourselves, and by the time we got back to the inn around midnight we knew we were too full to sleep.  So we walked around Evergreen and its small lake for an hour or more, hoping the exercise would do it.  But it didn't.  We didn't sleep too well that night.

            The next day we played golf on the Evergreen course.  It was on the side of a mountain and at that time had sand greens.  Later, we explored Central City, an old mining town now a favorite of tourists, then drove back to Evergreen and got a good night's sleep, and started back.  We stopped in Atwood, Kansas to visit Dad and his wife, Alice, and my two half-sisters, Susan and Clara.  Their accommodations were rather limited, but the basement guestroom had two twin beds. Dorothy and I slept on one bed to the interest and amazement of our hosts.  We didn't dare do much moving that night; otherwise one or the other would wind up on the floor. 

            We reached Minneapolis two days later and I went back to work on Monday.  There I learned they had been trying to find me for most of the week, even had the highway patrol on alert, but they couldn't locate us.  It seemed that one of the stores expected to open while I was gone had had a flood and the opening was delayed for several months.  They wanted me to take care of postponing the shipping dates of all the merchandise I'd ordered before going on the honeymoon.  We felt blessed that the highway patrol never found us.