I took the last week off from the blog because I needed to finish my taxes and Barb and I have been working on another project which I’ll tell you all about another time.
I wanted to say more about those four years I spent in high school. I think I’ve covered the farm about as completely as I can remember, but not so much about high school. I told you about my two best friends, David Peters and Bob Harrison. They both went to Belleview and I met them in the 9th grade. We were friends until after graduation and then we drifted apart as people do when they no longer have anything in common.
Strangely, I can’t remember having too many friends at Pennfield.
Bonnie Hendrickson was the name of the the girl I took to the Junior Prom. I remember almost nothing about the prom except that Bonnie was a year younger than me and seemed impressed to be going to the prom with me. We never got any further than just being friends, though.
My first real love interest was a girl named Nancy Letterman. Spelled just like David on TV, I think. She went to Pennfield and I remember that she lived very near to the school. Since I lived 15 miles away on the farm, the only time I saw her was at school. I used to get home from the bus ride and go right in and call her. By this time, I was starting to get interested in music and had bought some 45 records. I remember one time being real excited about this great new record I bought. It was Ferrante and Teicher and “Theme from The Apartment”. It’s an instrumental. They play dual pianos. It was and still is, a great song. I think I’ll write something about this on the number1project site. Anyway, I had come home from the store with the record and called her because I wanted to share the song with her. I played it (on a old record player – holding the phone receiver up to the speaker) and then asked her what she thought. she said “It sounds like somthing my mother would like.” Being of fragile self esteem anyway, I was really disappointed. I hung up and I don’t know if I ever shared another song with her.
Nancy had two beaus (boyfriends). Me and a big wrestler type named Dale Hoffman. When the senior Prom came along, I got to her first and asked to the prom. She accepted and I was worried that Dale was going to beat me up for that, but he didn’t.
I must say, it was a magical night. We had a great time and I thought that she was truly the girl for me. After the dance we had what we called “Senior’s night” All of the seniors drove over to Lake Michigan (about 1 and a half hours away) and swam in the lake in the middle of the night. It was all pretty much harmless fun. No orgy’s or anything. This was 1960, remember, and while some of the wilder kids did those things, I wasn’t part of that group and neither was Nancy. We had a really good time. The climax of the night was to go to (I believe) Howard Johnson’s in the morning and have breakfast. Then we all went home. I thought life couldn’t get any better than this.
During the following summer, I saw her as much as I could. We’d talk on the phone a lot. It was during that summer, I believe, that I played the record I talked about earlier.
There was one big problem, though: me. I have been and probably always will be a very pessamistic person. I was that way in high school. Dale, on the other hand was athletic and positive and pretty much everything I wasn’t. I don’t know why she stuck with me as long as she did, but I was sure that eventually, we’d get married and live happily ever after. As you know, it was not to be.
In the fall, I started school at the University of Michigan. I’ll go into detail on that later, but this is about Nancy. I was there at school (Ann Arbor, Michigan – about 75 miles east of Battle Creek) when one day I got a card from Nancy. Might have been my birthday, I don’t remember exactly. But I’ll never forget the card. On the front of the card it said:
“Look inside and you will see, exactly what you mean to me…”
I opened the card and the inside was blank. (It meant nothing.) I might have thought it was a joke, but down in the lower right hand corner of the card, she had written “That’s right.” A “Dear John” card if I ever saw one. This was her way of breaking up with me. I have never been as crushed as I was that day. I tried to call her but she wouldn’t speak to me. I finally got to talk to her mother and she told me that Nancy was engaged to Dale and they were going to be married in the spring. So, I didn’t need to call again. She was nice about it, but seemed particularly pleased that her daughter had chosen the right man.
It took me a long time to get over Nancy. There’s a P.S. to this story that came along about 20 years later. I’ll tell you that when I get to 1980.
More later…
Dad