大象传媒

Young, Foolish, and in Love

My parents were married on New Years Eve in 1941, three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. My father, Don, enlisted in the US Navy in the fall of 1942.
In the spring of 1945, he wrote home from California, to my mother, Betty, in Indiana, to say that he was about to be shipped back to the Pacific once more. She immediately sublet her job, and her apartment, and drove over two thousand miles to see him.
After four long, hard days of driving, Mom finally arrived in Oxnard, California, not far from Los Angeles, and telephoned the naval base. Mom was crying because she was so afraid that Dad would be mad. (So many women went out there and were stranded with no means to live, and no way to get back home.)
When Dad finally came on the line, and asked who was calling, she said: 鈥淏etty.鈥� He asked: 鈥淏etty Who?
After a day of not finding a place to stay, Mom was prepared to sleep in the car, if necessary. Yet, she decided that, because she had the car, she didn鈥檛 necessarily have to stay in town. After driving some miles out of Oxnard, she stopped at a farmhouse to ask if there might be a room to let. The man said that there wasn鈥檛. When Mom said that she would be glad to help with the housework, the farmer told her that their maid had just quit, and asked Mom to come back in the evening when his wife would be at home.
She was given a private room and bath off of the kitchen. She spent the next three weeks doing very light housework, and teaching their grown daughter to do the laundry. She was given time off whenever Dad had leave, and was paid handsomely, to boot.
Some years ago, Mom told me that she was going out to San Francisco to visit her brother, my Uncle Jim. When I asked her whether she was going to drive this time as she had in 1945, she looked at me as though I had lost my mind!
She said: 鈥淣o way! I鈥檓 flying! Back then, I was young, foolish, and in love!鈥�

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