Hope, Dreams and Reality
My Father and Mother met at
Woodlawn high school in 1948.
She was 14.
He was almost 20 and had served in the Marine Corps for two years.
She lived in East Lake.
He lived in Woodlawn.
In their letters,
which my Mother divided up and gave to my brothers and I,
they communicated their feelings all the time.
They wrote to each other often…
even though they saw each other at school.
The letters were hand-written,
they expressed a yearning and longing for each other almost unfamiliar for young people in today’s culture.
It was not graphic or guttural.
It was romantic
and somewhat innocent.
For they only saw each other in short moments at school,
and when they had they opportunity to date.
No car.
My Father took a streetcar to see her.
And then they rode the streetcar downtown to a theater.
Then back to her house
and then he rode another back home.
It was not convenient nor easy.
No cell phones.
When they could, they talked by telephone.
In the late 40’s and until the mid-60’s
most people in those two areas
of town had party lines.
If you are over 55 you remember what a “party line” was.
When one picked up the phone
receiver off of the dial …
one may have heard a neighbor talking.
And when you talked to someone,
the neighbors could be listening in
without you knowing.
They did not have easy access to each other ….as most people, even high schoolers, do now.
Cars at 16.
Credit cards for the gas and debit cards for easy expenditures. Cell phones at 10 or 12.
FaceTime whenever it’s desired.
Emails at any and all hours.
Easy access.
There is no real longing or yearning for something one cannot access…. because everything is quite immediately accessible.
Jimmy and Peggy had no easy avenue in their young romance.
This was the reason so many young people married at young ages.
My Father married my Mother two years after they met.
He was 22.
She was 16.
She was married in August before her senior year of high school.
War was coming, he was a Reservist
and reality forced many issues.
The inaccessibility in the early relationship lead to more thought than action.
That developed some maturity that is not there nowadays.
Socially, young people now are further along….
but are less morally and ethically mature.
She wrote to him while he was in the Marine Reserves…..
when she was 17….
of her desire to have a baby boy.
That would be me……
as she gave birth to me
when she was 19.
That was their desire.
To be together, to have
and raise a family.
Going to college was not an option.
My Father was high school teammates and friends with Bobby Bowden.
My Parents and the Bowdens were both married about the same time and shared a small apartment building in the first year or so both couples were married.
She wanted to eat sardines and crackers once. My Father told her she would have to go outside because of the fishy smell. Playfully, he locked the door and she had to go to sit with Anne Bowden until the smell went away.
The Korean War had started
in 1950.
World War ll had ended a little over four years earlier.
There was war in the Middle East after
Israel became a nation.
LIFE was more immediate and threatening in its reality….
not delayed by college,
graduate school and European travel.
War was a cloud that shrouded many dreams.
As I read their letters, after she passed away, I realized their lives in those early years were full….
not of the experiences which teenagers now may go through…. but of thoughts and desires not realized.
And those letters were full of hope.
Hope for what was not yet known or experienced.
And for what was to come.
And what was hoped for was threatened by those Wars and the uncertainty of life….. which we do not know today.
When my younger brother was born in 1955, there was a threat soon after that ….that my Father would have to be deployed because of conflicts in Lebanon.
It drew them together.
Without selfish distractions.
In 1962, shortly after my youngest brother was born the Cuban Missile Crisis again brought the world to a threatened position.
Again, the bond that was forged between them early on…
sustained them again.
And further connected them.
These continual threats from the outside drew them in,
toward each other.
That had been their life….
drawing in toward each other
against the storms raging outside.
When he passed away in 1983,
at 55……..she was 49.
She never remarried.
Never thought about it.
For her life had been and was full of the Man she so greatly desired, dreamed of and thought about as a young girl and woman.
And the Man she had been drawn so close to by the forces between them…away from those outside conflicts.
Terry Bethea 