The Telegram
He stood on a street corner near Philadelphia City Hall with 2 other sailors, their ship in port for the weekend. He saw her on the opposite corner, and waved to her. She turned away, incensed that a stranger was waving to her. He decided to cross the street. The rest is history.
I grew up hearing the story many times, but I’m sure that there were other details.
I don’t know the year that my mother first met my father on the street corner near City Hall. She had graduated from Indiana High School in 1949 in the little town of Indiana, Pa. Indiana was famous for two things: It was considered the ‘Christmas Tree Capital of the World’ and for being the home of Jimmy Stewart. Other than Indiana University of Pennsylvania there wasn’t much else.
My Great Aunt Gail had gone to nursing school at Germantown Hospital in Philadelphia and stayed to work there. At some point after my mother graduated she left Indiana and went to live with Aunt Gail. Mom was able to secure a civilian government job with the Signal Corp in Center City Philadelphia in a secretarial pool.
Between her graduation from high school and her marriage to my father in 1953 there were a few things that happened. Eventually, she moved into her own apartment and began life on her own. Her encounter of meeting my father happened about three years before they married. I don’t know how much she knew about my father, or how long they dated as he met her when his ship docked at the Philadelphia Naval Yards. I don’t know if she knew that he had been married and had a daughter who was born in October 1946– — nine years before I would arrive.
Whether it was distance or the Navy that separated them for three years is uncertain. My father always seemed to be at sea in his duties as a baker on several Navy ships. I would find this information in his Navy records in 1996. I obtained them when trying to find my sister that I knew I had from his previous marriage.
In those three years, my mother would become engaged to a man from South Jersey named Bud. A wedding was planned and she was to be married in August 1953. At the last minute, just days before the wedding he broke her heart and called the wedding off. As my mother would tell the story, she had been devastated.
However my parents drifted apart will remain a mystery. Shortly after my mother was to be married, my grandparents received a phone call from my father. He told them that he had lost touch with my mother, and that he was trying to contact her. He had remembered where my grandparents lived and knew their names. My guess is that they had met my father at one time in the few years before, so my grandmother gave him my mother’s contact information. Perhaps she shared that my mother was recovering from the shock of her broken engagement and impending wedding.
And so, my parents reconnected. I don’t know where my father lived at the time, but he was no longer in the Navy. I’m sure there were some phone conversations that ensued, but I do know this. My mother told me that my dad expressed that even though they had lost touch he had never forgotten her.
Years went by, and one day on a visit to see my mother in Harrisburg she retold this story again. I was probably in my twenties by then. By this time, she had survived being a widow at age 34, and had remarried at 37 to my stepfather. She had a fifth child at 39, which would be my youngest brother Jeff.
She pulled out a telegram that she had kept that was sent by my father. The paper was fragile, and pieces of the paper were missing. It was dated November 3, 1953. She said, “I think you should have this…..” as she handed it to me.
I placed the pieces on the kitchen table to read the message. The memory of that day and the visceral reaction I had when reading the telegram is still fresh in my mind.
“Mom! Do you see what this says?”
She looked at me, with a confused look on her face. “I don’t know what you mean….”
I read the entire telegram out loud to her and still she didn’t understand.
My father came back into my mother’s life after an absence of three years on November 4, 1953.
My father married my mother on November 24, 1953.
My father died….exactly twelve years later on November 4, 1965.
For all those years she held that telegram never understanding the meaning of the message. My mother was a woman who did not hold on to keepsakes, and so for reasons unknown this treasure survived one of the routine purges she had done of the past.
She handed to me. I put the telegram in an envelope for preservation. Eventually I put it into an album where it remained since that day. Perhaps she knew that one day I would want to tell their story.
In those twelve years they lived a lifetime.
It wasn’t an easy twelve years. It was an everyday struggle.
For all the struggles that they had, I know that the foundation that kept them together was love, and their four little children.
Over the years a few family member expressed the same thing to me. The general consensus was that my mother changed drastically after my father’s premature death. They all expressed that she never stopped loving my father. It helped me to understand her behavior after my father’s death.
Mom lived 45 years longer than my father did, and created a new life. And it certainly was not her happily ever after.
As I write this, I realized why I was moved to tell this story tonight. Ten years ago tomorrow my mom passed away.
I’ll take this as her message that it was time to tell the story of the telegram.
There are no coincidences in this life. Thanks mom.
