Romance in the Air

In the first part of this memory from 1963 I told about the death of my grandmother and about the 4^th of July celebration at the fair in NH. I’m not sure if those were the incidents that made it such a memorable week of camping, or if it was the sheer number of things that happened that week. At any rate, as I was in bed last night all my other memories of that week came flooding back and I thought I should write about them too. This is part two of my memories for the week and there will be a third part as well.

The two incidents here both involve romance. The first one is about the son of the owner of the campground. As I mentioned in part one, there was a camp “store” at the entrance of the camp and the actual camping sites were about a half-mile back off the road. The owners ran the store and lived in the building (at least during the summer camping season). They were probably around 50 years old. Their son, who was 25, had been serving in the US Navy and was completing his tour of duty and was being discharged that summer. He was discharged when the ship he was on docked in New Orleans and he then acquired a car and drove back to NH from Louisiana. But when he arrived at the camp in mid-week, he had a surprise for his parents.

Apparently, before the ship docked in New Orleans they had stopped at the Navy base in Newport News, VA for a while. He had met a girl there and fallen in love. So on his trip back up the east coast he had stopped in VA and gotten married and so he arrived at the camp with his new bride. That was surprise number one. The second part of the surprise was that although he was 25, she was only 16! But apparently her parents had given their permission for the marriage. (It’s also possible that they gave permission because she was pregnant by him, but this was 1963 and you didn’t talk about such topics openly.) The final part of the surprise was that although he was a quite short individual, being only 5’4”, his new bride was 6’2”, a full 10” taller than he was! One of the camp jobs that they took on was driving the hay wagon that pulled all the kids around the campground every evening. Because of the difference in height, she sat on the tractor and he sat in her lap. It was a very interesting match – I often wondered what became of it.

The other incident of romance involved myself. In July of 1963 I would have been almost 15. There was a girl in the campground around the same age and this was one of my first experiences with having romantic feelings toward a member of the opposite sex. I wasn’t much into girls otherwise. On the night of the 4^th of July when we all went to the county fair to see the big bonfire, I asked my father for some money so I could spend the evening with this girl – her name was Marilyn (don’t ask me how such a detail came back to me last night, my mind stores the most amazing facts sometimes!) He gave me perhaps $5, enough for buying some fair food and trying a few of the arcades. In the dark later, sitting and watching the huge bonfire, it was also my first non-relative kiss! A memorable evening indeed. Unfortunately, she and her family left the campground the following day, but the memory stayed with me.