Chapter Two--The Meeting

Here I would like to fill in a little historical detail. I write some of this not to be telling so much about myself as to try to picture for my grand ones and great grand ones (when they get big enough to read) some concepts about the way it was then, so they can have some means of comparison of life today.

I had made it through my senior year of high school in Dallas working and going to school mainly because I liked to have some money to spend and because my folks did not have it nor did they see the need of putting any in my pockets. However, they did provide basic necessities, a place to sleep and food to eat, for which I am grateful. They also insisted on me getting an education and they provided for it as best that they could.

As I recall the first semester I rode the bus from school downtown to my job at a drive-in root beer establishment. One of dad’s church members owned the place and he gave me a great job at fifty cents and hour from 4:00 P. M. until closing and cleanup at somewhere between 11:30 and midnight, depending on how busy we had been. I would get home and set my alarm for 5:00 A.M., get up, study a bit and catch a bus to school. Saturdays were much easier.

I was taking photography in high school (it was a technical high school), so I decided to get a job in my field. I got a job at Browne and Browne on Main Street that day. I was hired to develop the film each day after school. The job entailed working with cut-film holders in the dark and putting the exposed film through the developer, stop and fixer with a timer. I also had to load all the holders for the next day’s run, mix the chemicals when they went flat and then sweep the floor if I had time before 5:30 P.M. I also had to work on Saturday. I think the pay was something like $10.00 a week. Sometimes I would take the Speed Graphic (this was a 4” x 5” large format camera that used cut-film holders, with a battery operated flash unit that fired flash bulbs in sequence with the shutter opening) out in the evening and do a shoot at a school dance or some such function for a little extra money. That job enabled me to stay in Dallas and finish high school when about January of that year, the folks moved to Springtown. So, today, when I pick up my little light-weight digital camera that somehow takes great pictures without the benefit of silver halide salts and just sends the images via a wire to my computer, I marvel at how far we have come and wonder what is next.

I got to Abilene in September of that year and even before enrolling in school I got a job in a downtown cafeteria as assistant fry cook. I guess they liked my experience in the fast food business. I did not really like that job since it required working late at night cleaning up the kitchen after a hard dinner run. I think the pay was still fifty cents an hour. Within a few months I had moved on up to soda fountain “manager” at fifty five cents at a drugstore right across the street from the campus of ACC (now ACU).

I worked behind one of those (what is now considered old-fashioned) soda fountains with a marble counter about 20 feet long with little round stools for the customers. The back side, or business side of the counter had a large freezer for ice cream and an ice machine. The freezer had little doors to open up for access to the five-gallon cartons of ice cream in different flavors. There were pumps that you just push down and squirt whatever syrup into a glass with ice in it for a coke or then go the cherry pump for a cheery coke, or the root beer pump, or the strawberry pump for what ever flavor or flavors that were ordered and then to the carbonated stuff so it would be fizzy. At the very back end was a grille for hamburgers or tuna fish sandwiches or sometimes we made soup or stew. There were three (I think) malt mixers and a place for dishes and cups and glasses and cones. It was quite an operation and one could get real busy with 10 or 15 people all wanting different things at once between classes.

This one high school student (enter Carolyn from stage right again) would come in almost every morning and she would order a box of Post Toasties (you know those little one-serving kind you get in restaurants) and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I thought that a bit of an oddity for a breakfast, but there is no accounting for individual tastes. I was interested in knowing her better, but that was just not the way it was done in 1956. As fortune would have it, I had become acquainted with some of the fellows in her classes and finally asked one of them to formally introduce me to her. He did. And we did date some, but I understand that she was cautious (as I learned later, she was told I was pretty wild, working behind the soda fountain and all that). It took some doing, but soon we hit it off pretty well.

Now I am not sure at this juncture whether it was the Post Toasties or the vanilla ice cream, but to tell you the truth, I was smitten.

Chapter One--Personal History (short version)

I was born in Dallas, Texas, August 15, 1937. I did not know it at the time, but the population of that little town then was about 350,000 and one could, for a few cents, ride a city bus downtown, get on a loud, clanging, banging electric street car and go almost anywhere there was to go. Some of my earliest memories involved going downtown with my mother to some of the large department stores of the era like Titche-Goettinger (which is now Dillards) and Sanger-Harris. We would walk on the sidewalks and I remember keeping myself attached to her hand, because the city was a big noisy place. Now I cringe and tense up just driving through that place of more than a million souls, all in cars and big trucks on big highways that engineers had not even dreamed of 60 years ago. My hometown has changed and I have changed.

I remember riding my bicycle to school with my bicycle lock key tied on a string around my neck, which was a sort of badge of achievement. Sometimes I walked the mile or more past a large place that I know now was the VA hospital, to school and in bad weather we were taken in a car. It must have been a large school for the time, as they had blue birds, red birds and yellow birds in what was called “baby low first.” I was a yellow bird. Funny how some of those minute details of childhood seem to just be stuck there, but if one wants to remember a detail, even if one thought that that detail were pretty important, it just will not come through the fog. I remember clearly, for example, my third-grade (or was it fourth grade?) teacher, Mrs. Sharp asking me several times to stand before the class and read the scriptures (it seems that I had come into possession of a pamphlet of the gospel of John that I would take to school with me). In today’s politically correct milieu that most likely would not be acceptable behavior for a public school teacher. Probably I was able to read publicly better than most for my age because the church folks where we went to church encouraged the young boys to get in front of the congregation and read and sing and so on, as a kind of training. I probably took to that like a duck to water, as it must have fed my little ego. Funny, I don’t remember the girls in that church to be so encouraged.

In about 1946-7 my dad decided to buy a farm. He had returned from his part in WWII and, I imagine, had access to the government sponsored loan programs that enabled and encouraged such things in those days. Let the reader understand that, as a child, I certainly did not know about nor was I privy to the intricacies of family finance at the time. I’m looking back with adult knowledge at this point. Kids of that time period were expected to eat at the second table when there was company and to be seen, but not heard too much. Anyway, I learned to plow, slop hogs, milk cows and do all sorts of farm things, as well as attend a rural one-room school. All good training for what was ahead.

Daddy had begun to preach in Dallas even before he was drafted in the Army. He was evidently convinced that the Church of Christ was the only acceptable and right way of thinking and so we all went to church three time a week at least. Dad has always even to this day at 95 years old, maintained a preaching position with some church. Most of the time he had to support his family by some sort of work beyond what the churches he served could offer. We went from the farm, in 1951, to west Texas and back to Dallas in about three years, whereupon I had almost finished high school and when the family decided to move again, I stayed on with a family friend and finished my senior year.

Since I was going to be a Church of Christ preacher, I enrolled in Abilene Christian College in the fall of 1955. I would be the first in my family to darken the door of a college. Needless to say, I was very ignorant of the whole process of higher education. I do not recall having any sessions with guidance counselors or any preachers for that matter. I do not recall being involved in any sort of advising, such as I have had to do with students as a college professor later in life. But the ministry idea had somehow settled in my mind when I first got to Abilene. I may come back to this point in a later chapter, but for now, let me say that I really think that when reality dawned upon me when I had to face some facts about going to classes and reading things I probably would rather not, the clarity of my decision began to fade. In hindsight, it appears that my spiritual aspirations were momentarily pushed aside by other more pressing concerns, namely how to manage to eat and find a place to sleep out of the weather. I think that is called growing up.

And so ends the “short” version of my personal history, pre-Carolyn. I have said all this to bring you to this point, a sort of this-is-who-I-was at the time. Enter from stage-right: Sue Broadus (not Susie and not Carolyn at that point). She had come to Mecca for her own reasons and I, of course for mine. We can call this fate or karma or God’s will, according to our world-view. It may have been pure coincidence, but is there really such a thing? However, here are two individuals, two persons in the same environment. The chemistry, the charged atmosphere, the attraction of opposites, I do not know what it was or is. But I choose to call it love, a love that has grown roots, deep roots, a love that calls for solid commitment, for as long as there is breath to sustain it.

Preface--A Walk Down Memory Lane: a slightly different perspective

Having read as much of Carolyn’s SnowStory Here as she has compiled to date and having enjoyed the interaction of other family members, even adding comments from time to time myself, it has occurred to me to attempt to put forth my own version of the story. It has been said (and with some certainty) that every marriage has two stories, two versions, two sides of the same coin: hers and his.

From the outset, let me be clear that this is not an attempt to overshadow, to undermine, to dispute, to discredit or in any way detract from what Carolyn has done. She has produced a superb work so far and I concur with her details and dates and admire her tenacity and persistency in continuing her task. That the work is creditable and very worthwhile is obvious, that fact also being verified by the comments both inside and outside the blog by our immediate children, as well as the excitement of their children who seem to savor a sense of their own history.

Therefore, I want to start at the beginning and share some thoughts, some memories, some images and some insights as we take this walk together. I do not anticipate that this effort will be easy nor will it be necessarily quick. The work will go in spurts a little here and a lot there, so be patient. A little encouragement, and an “amen” from time to time will certainly be appropriate. So, let me take a breath, a very deep breath and get some thoughts together and I’ll see you in chapter one.

It would appear that someone is attempting to entice me to fill the unfilled space in my blog. Please note that, until just a short while ago, I was totally unaware of the term blog. When I first saw it I thought that it must be some sort of combination of a bog (a watery marshy area, mostly to be avoided) and maybe a blob (a large jelly-like mass of greenish slimy stuff, again mostly to be avoided).

Well I was wrong (and that’s not the first time that’s happened!).

A blog is an electronic place to capture one’s thoughts and then to let the world see them, for better or sometimes for worse.

So, I succumbed when “Enscussions” was invented by some relatives of mine. And I named my first venture into blogland “Dave’s Raves.” Now, I’m not too sure that was a good name, namely because I am too tired to rave much anymore.

Well, for all you relatives who have been encouraging me to write more, here is a start.