It was the 1950’s. The decade of poodle skirts, car hops, Elvis, and Rock and Roll. My dad played the tenor sax in a big band for local dances around Fort Worth. The leader of that band was my mother’s uncle, Jimmy.
In the summer of 1952, when my mother was 15, she used to go to the dances where her uncle’s band played. When the band had a break, my dad came to sit at the table with his pal, Jimmy, and Jimmy introduced them. Mom says Daddy barely spoke to her. He was handsome, well-dressed, and older,(17) while she was a girl his mother considered “from the wrong side of the tracks”. Her parents were divorced, she moved from rented house to rented house every time her step-father lost a job, or her mother got bored.
In reality, Daddy was smitten from the first moment he laid eyes on her. But he was really shy. An only child of older parents, he grew up sheltered and his parents had very high expectations for his prospects. That fall he went off to Notre Dame. A year and a half later, he was home for Christmas break and Uncle Jimmy needed a date for his pal, (my dad) so they could double date, and called my mom. Mom says she had a big crush on Daddy, though he hardly spoke to her at all, but he asked her out for the next 2 nights! In mid-January he left for the spring semester at Notre Dame. And, though he returned to Fort Worth during the summer and Christmas breaks, he wrote to her from the Indiana university several times every week.
My mom has kept those letters all these years. His correspondence was fairly tame, detailing his daily life, but the progression of his feelings is there, though mostly subtle. Here are a few snippets.
