My parents met in 1946. After college my mother started working as secretary to the head of the psychiatry department at Boston Children’s Hospital, sharing an apartment in the Back Bay with a couple of friends.
My father had just returned from the war. As a “conscientious objector,” he had volunteered for the American Field Service as an ambulance driver.
Attached to the British 8th, he served on the front lines in North Africa and eventually Italy, by way of Sicily. He was at the Battle of Monte Cassino, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the war. One can only imagine the horrors he witnessed.
After the war ended, he returned to Brooklyn, where he had moved after college, and resumed his career as a copywriter on Madison Ave.
In August of ’46, both my parents chose to vacation at the same hotel, the Inverurie in Bermuda (pictured above), on the shores of Hamilton Harbour.
There’s one thing you need to know about my father. He was a stitch. His quick wit and dry delivery had us laughing constantly, especially at the dinner table. In the radio era, in fact, he had written comedy for Bing Crosby, Don Ameche, Cliff Arquette, Henry Morgan, and other personalities.
Once, reminiscing about meeting my mother in Bermuda, he quipped, “It was a small island. I couldn’t get away from her.” Deadpan, of course. Fortunately my mother, knowing his lighthearted, playful brand of humor, thought he was as funny as we all did, and laughed heartily.
They married three short months later, despite living in separate cities during their entire courtship. The wedding took place in Bethlehem, PA on Thanksgiving Day, 1946, at Bethany Reformed Church, the same church my father’s maternal grandfather had once served. They remained happily together for the next (almost) 64 years.
At the point of their meeting, as I alluded to earlier, my mother had experienced much tragedy in her short life. Her younger brother, Carl, developed a high fever at 18 months and sustained permanent brain damage. He would later die at the age of 23.
Then, when he was 12, her older brother, Augie, whom she absolutely adored, developed strep throat. Because the year was 1932, antibiotics were not as yet available. In two weeks he was dead. He had been the golden child of the family. Heartlessly, her parents called from the hospital to tell her the news!
These events and others caused a downward spiral in the family. Her parents started drinking and eventually divorced. Mom and her mother, Dorothy, moved from hotel to hotel. Mom would come home from school on the subway only to find an empty room and a small amount of money to buy herself dinner somewhere.
Worse still, in 1936, Mom’s distraught mother, roughly 4 years after her son’s untimely death, jumped out of a window at the Hotel Paris on West End Ave. The story appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News the next morning. My mother was only 15-years-old.
Remarkably, in spite of all this, she kept up her schoolwork, continued to sing in the church choir, graduated near the top of her high school class, and went off to college. She truly was, as she often referred to herself, a “survivor.”
Years before these events, she and her brother Augie had stood on a rock in front of their grandparents’ CT house. There they made a blood pact promising to each other that they’d “always be strong.” She kept her end of the bargain.
In the midst of all this tragedy, as I said, she had decided that one day she’d marry a minister.
When she met my father on the beach in Bermuda, and discovered that he’d come from a family of pastors (though he himself was not), her hopes seemed fulfilled.