Finding Love

Finding Love

I guess at a early age I kind of liked the girls even if I was awkward around them. At the age of around 6 Pamela was the first girl I kissed. Through grade school I didn’t really have much to do with the opposite sex but did have one date with a Girl who live across the street when I was in the 6th grade. We went to a Friday night football game and she didn’t really have much to do with me after that. In junior high I was introduced to my kissing cousins. We attended church Sunday and Wednesday and after the services we would go to the local drive in for a snack. We were not old enough to drive so we would all pile in to a older friends car and drive around all over town and I would usually sit in the back seat with two or three of my cousins on each side of me. One night for some reason they started kissing me. This was very upsetting to me, Ha Ha, as they would keep track of which one of them kissed me the most.

One of the older friends that would drive us around was the preacher daughter, Ruth. She was 4 years older then me and soon she was in on these kissing
sessions. I was in the 8th grade and she was a senior in high school. She would take my cousins home first and me last, and we would talk till quite late into the night. She would give me a kiss goodnight and I would go in and go to bed thinking about what was happening. This was a new feeling for me. This went on until she graduated and was going to go to college that next year. She came to my house and wanted to talk to me. I went to the car and she said that she had the deep feelings for me and that she wanted to write back and forth from college. She said that even though she was 4 years older than me and had been teased about robbing the cradle, she loved me and wanted to be together later.

I agreed and we corresponded that next school year. I went on with my Freshmen year of high school. I kept busy with basketball and my school work. That next spring I went to the Woodston church camp and after a couple of days Ruth showed up and introduced me to her fiancee and shoved this engagement ring in my face. I was devastated and completely surprised. So I decided to move on and find another girl. My kissing cousins set me up with a girl from Greatbend and we dated for a couple of nights. She had to go home before the camp meeting was over so the next night this girl, another preachers daughter, ask me to go with her. We went to the services that night and after the service we walked around and she pulled me into an empty tent. We set on a cot and she started kissing me only this was a French kiss, my first. She started getting a little too frisky for me so I told her I didn’t believe in having sex before marriage. Well she was intent on having more than I was willing to give her so she moved onto another guy the next night that would please her. In the mean time the other girl from Greatbend decided to come back, so when she found me with this other girl it broke her heart. My cousins informed me of this so I apologized to her but to
no avail. I think I had done all this to show Ruth that I could be fine without her.

Later in the fall our church youth group went to Wichita for a state convention. This was the first time I think I stayed in a hotel. It was neat how we could walk down the hall going to the rooms, touch someone and send this ½ inch spark through their ear. I meet this girl Sharon who was from Overland Park, Kansas. We set together during the services and she gave me her address and I gave her mine. We started corresponding over the next years and she said she was falling in love with me even though I thought we were just pen pals. After about 2 years I had to write her a letter explaining that I was planning marriage with someone else and she sent me this heart breaking letter of sadness of losing me.

During my junior year of high school Ruth came back to town and came to the house and wanted to talk to me. She told me that she had broke up with her fiancee because she decided she was still in love with me. I listened to her as she said she was sorry for what she had done and wanted to get back together with me again. I told her that I wasn’t sure if I could as she had hurt me very deeply. She had decided to for go college and go to beauty school in Salina. She would come home on some week ends and we started dating again. I tried to keep up my guard and kept telling her she better not dump me again. We corresponded writing letters and seeing each other on the week ends when she was home. She graduated from beauty school and went to work in a local beauty shop. That spring I decided to get a job with my dad doing road construction. I drove a packing tractor for that summer on those hot summer days. In the fall I decided to ask Ruth if she would marry me. I asked her dad and he agreed but had some concerns about the 4 years age difference. I bought a engagement ring set and popped the question. We stated the process of planning a wedding. I had saved enough money that summer so I bought my first car, a 1954 Chevy. Sure wished I had that old car now.

So I started my senior year engaged and planning to be married that next summer of 1961. I worked odd jobs the first of the school year and decided it was time to get a real job. I started looking and heard about the local funeral parlor needing help. I made an appointment and found out he was wanting experienced help. I then applied at the local grocery store and was put to work as the Produce manager. Now with a regular job I went to the local appliance store and bought a dinette set and a new washer and dryer. I was making payments on these my senior year. In school I had 3 hours of wood shop so I built a mahogany bedroom set and a oak china hutch. We also built a beauty shop in our home as she planed on going into business for herself. By the time I graduated I had our home pretty well furnished. I traded my 54 Chevy for a 59 Chevy in 1961. It was a really nice car with those big fins on the back.

I graduated from high school in the spring of 1961 and we were married in June. We had a large wedding with 6 or 7 attendants standing on each side of us. As I was waiting for her atI the front of the church, she came in the back of the church with her father and we sang a song to each other, I love you truly. She sang a verse to me and then I sang a verse to her. The church was packed but I got through it. We went to Colorado Springs on our honey moon. We came back and settled into the normal routine of married life. I worked 6 days a week as a produce manager and she opened her beauty shop and was doing quite well. We were blessed with a little girl born in August of 1962. Here was this little bundle of joy we named Valerie.

My parents moved to Washington state that year and as they left dad tried to talk me into moving there to. In the spring of 1963 we decided to take a vacation to Washington to visit my parents. We drove 100 miles to Kearney Nebraska where we boarded a train and they picked us up in Tacoma Washington. This was our first train ride an even though we were traveling with a baby we really enjoyed it. We had a nice time visiting all the sites and were amazed at all those trees. Everything was green and we drove 100 miles to the ocean and 50 miles to the top of MT Rainier. On one of the days we were spending time at home Ruth was doing hair for my sisters and decided to do two of my brothers Jim and Dennis. She washed and set their hair like they were girls and since there hair was long enough that it curled nicely and changed them into girls. We were able to get movies of them even though they weren’t happy about it. Four or five days before we were suppose to return home to Kansas, Ruth got upset at me and said she was going to return early. I guess that I had spent so much time with my family that I didn’t pay enough attention to her. I patched it up with her but later wondered if maybe I should of let her go. We boarded the train for home and settled in learning to sleep to the clickity clack of the train track. We arrived in Kearney late in the evening and when we went to get our car, that we had left with a friend. They tried to get us to stay the night but I told them that I had to be at work the next morning. So we set off around 10:00 PM on the 100 mile trip home.

We went through Smith Center Kansas which was about 20 miles from home. I had been having trouble falling asleep at the wheel but thought I could make it home. It was around 1:00 in the morning and Ruth and Valerie were both asleep. I guess I was asleep too because I woke up to Ruth yelling “Look Out” Then there was this big crunch and I was knock out and didn’t even know what I had hit until I came too later. I didn’t feel anything yet but as I came too I yelled for Ruth and Valerie. I could see the stars and hear the popping of metal. I tried to stand up and found out that my leg wouldn’t hold me and that I didn’t have any control of it. I took the weight off of it and stood on my other leg that wasn’t broken. I then realized that I had hit a bridge and the car went across a creek bed landed on its top smashing the top down to the seats and then landing back on the wheels. I was standing in the car up through where the wind shield used to be. I tried to get out of the car but my leg wouldn’t come out as my femur was broken. I had to lift my leg out of the car and tumbled down to the ground. I was still looking for Ruth and Valerie when to my horror there was Ruth under the car all except her feet. I lost it and tried to lift the car off her and then tried to pull her out, but I knew she was dead. Then I saw the lifeless body of Valerie about 10 feet from the car and she had a big gash in her head and I knew she was gone too. By then I started to feel some pain set in. I prayed for god to take me too if it was his will as I couldn’t understand why this had happened to us. As I lay there on the ground and realized that I was bleeding real bad on my hand from cutting it when I got out of the car. I also had several broken ribs and a broken collar bone. I then tried to crawl up out of the ravine by using my one good leg and one good arm. I pulled myself about 15 feet from the car but couldn’t get any farther. I listened to the frogs croaking and the other night sounds and every once in a while I would hear a car coming, as it got closer I would yell “ help, help ” and of course they couldn’t hear me. This happened several times during the night until day break when I heard a car stop. I heard a door open but didn’t see anyone as I yell for help. I then heard the door slam shut and the car sped away. I thought, oh no they didn’t hear me. About an hour later help arrived and they came down to help me. I asked them if they could cover up my family as they were both dead. I told them where I was hurt and that I knew that when they lifted me onto the gurney it was going to hurt. I yelled out in pain and then they carried me up to the ambulance. I asked them to call my father-in-law and let him know what had happened. They took me to the Smith Center Hospital, put my leg in a splint and sewed up my cuts on my hand, arm and leg. By then my father-in-law arrived and came in to see me. I cried and told him I was sorry for what had happened.

The doctors decided to send me to the hospital in Hays Kansas as they weren’t equipped to operate on my leg. I was pretty well out of it from the morphine they put me on. After the long trip I was admitted to St Anthony hospital and taken into surgery to put a steel rod in the middle of my leg bone. They found that I had one lung collapsed so they couldn’t put the rod in and instead put in a steel pin through the bone just below my knee so they could put my leg in traction. So when I woke up there I was with this traction bar overhead with rope through pulleys and weights holding my leg bone apart. The doctor came in the next day and explained that they would gradually remove part of the weigh letting the broken bone move together. After that was done the doctor said that the bone was lined up perfectly and that they decided not to put in the rod and just let it heal with me in traction. When they told me when the funeral was going to be, I asked to go but of course wasn’t able to. I had said my goodbyes out there in that creek bed. They were buried in a casket together and later on I put on their grave marker, together in birth, together in life, and together in death.

After five months in the Hospital they put me in a body cast for another five months. When I went back to the Doctor to remove the cast I looked at this shriveled up leg and had to walk with crutches for quite a while. I was married at 17, a father at 18, and a widower at 19. I look back today and wonder how I managed to make it through all that but with Gods help I made it.