Finally, a man stopped. Didn’t say a word. Seemed angry at me for making his day worse. But he changed the tire. I thanked him profusely. He shrugged. By the time I reached Globe, about a hundred miles from home, everything was closed except a grubby one-man gas station. “Electrical system,” he said. He fixed it with duct tape and chewing tobacco. It got me home.
That and the angry Samaritan were the only bits of good news all day.
Terry
Saturday, 28 November 1964, Glendale. Aside from the fact I’d been alone the entire holiday—including my birthday on the twenty-fifth—and the painful void that Annie’s pilgrimage to Albuquerque made in my Thanksgiving, this turned out to be a bellwether day.
I was home alone, but I was no longer alone in my battle with the draft. Back on November 18, after we’d gotten the News-Herald to press, I put together a packet of my correspondence with the draft board and wrote to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors in Philadelphia, asking for advice. Now, ten days later, I heard back from the CCCO’s executive director, Arlo Tatum:
Your letter to the local board of 31st October is truly excellent. It makes me wish that you could be a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the requirement that conscientious objectors be religious in order to obtain that classification—assuming we have success with the Seeger case now before the Supreme Court. However, you would not have much of a court case unless you “exhaust all the administrative remedies” and this includes the taking of a physical.
He warned that since I hadn’t shown up for the physical exam, I was now liable for “a delinquency notice.” The draft board could issue that notice and order me to report for immediate induction. They could screw up my life—and sabotage my marriage!
Tatum added:
If you are ordered to report for induction on the basis of a delinquency notice, you could not then marry your fiancée and cause the induction order to be cancelled. If you took your pre-induction physical exam, and were ordered to report for induction, you could marry and cause the induction notice to be cancelled.
Contact a lawyer—immediately, Tatum said. He referred me to one in Phoenix.
Okay, Arlo. Annie had been pushing me anyway. She was right—it was time to talk to an expert.
Ann
Late Saturday, November 28, 1964, Glendale. Two nights after Thanksgiving, I slumped on my sofa, barking like a sea lion, too sick and too tired to move. Slowly, the road vibrations dissipated. “Oh, Ter, the trip home was miserable. The whole darn weekend was miserable!”
I dribbled out my sad tale of Thanksgiving, starting with the wretched drive back. I couldn’t stop hacking. He found some cough drops, fixed me a cup of hot chocolate, cozied me in my down comforter, eased down beside me, and held my hand.
To protect the open wounds beneath the Garretson armor, I didn’t divulge the worst details, not wanting to prejudice him against my family. We planned to marry for life, to hold our families close. So somewhere at the bottom of Salt River Canyon, I had swallowed the most cutting words—gift of gab, indoctrinated, real man, and command the best. All I needed to tell him was that they didn’t want us to get married.
“I don’t know, Ter. In some ways, their opposition makes me want to barrel ahead. Get married in Mexico City. The heck with them all.”
“Elope?”
“Why not? Mom and Dad did. Talk about just deserts. You didn’t know that, did you? And here’s why—her parents rejected him. They were hard-core Baptist teetotalers. A man who had a sip of liquor now and then—which Dad did—wasn’t fit to marry their daughter.
“But I’m not serious about eloping, of course. We want a simple wedding, a meaningful ceremony in a setting that inspires us . . . Right?”
He nodded and kissed my hand.
“And we want to share our joy with friends and family.”
But reality told us we’d have a heck of a time pulling off a wedding by Christmas, now less than a month away. We had drafted our clever invitation but hadn’t printed it. We had no location. No minister. No wedding dress. No ring. No plans for a rehearsal dinner. Nothing.
“What do we need to rehearse anyway?” Terry asked. “A wedding’s a snap: Walk down the aisle. Say ‘I do!’ and ‘Me too!’ Then kiss the bride. And dive into bed.”
“TERRRRRRY!” That set off another coughing fit.
“Or we could live together in sin. Easier and more Bohemian.” He snickered.
I ignored him. “Let’s see how much we can pull together in a week. And then we can decide.”
Terry
Wednesday, 6:10 p.m., 2 December 1964, Glendale. So far, a banner week. I had called Arlo Tatum’s CCCO lawyer in Phoenix first thing on Monday. He had agreed to meet Thursday morning. At work, we put the week’s issue to bed in the late afternoon. Immediately after, the publisher called me in for an early Christmas present—he promoted me to editor. I’d take over January 1. The gang and I were celebrating with a rousing toast as Annie scooted into our booth at La Cocina.
By eight-thirty, everyone else had gone home, and it was just the two of us.
“How you coming on the wedding plans?” Annie asked, her voice still raspy from her cold.
“Got a letter from Allen in Silverton. He’s thrilled to be best man. He’s not hot on driving over, though—it’s eight hours. Plus, Christmas week is tough. He’s got a lot of printing to do. He wants to fly—if we’ll foot half the fare. It’s steep: $36.75. Other than that, nothing. But jeez, today’s only Wednesday. When was I supposed to—”
“Me too. Christmas is impossible. We’ll never make it. And I got another epistle from Dad. Listen to this: ‘It was nice having you here, but we hated to see you leave unhappy. I am sure you realize, Ann, that you can do as you please in this matter and we won’t think any less of you—because we do love you.’” And then I got to the crux of the letter:
All we are asking is that you wait until summer. You have obligations to those you work for as well as to yourself. We are not prejudiced and will make ourselves compatible with whatever choice you make. However, it would really be a burden on you, Sis, to take on a husband in the middle of the year. If you waited until June you would have the whole summer to get adjusted.
“So you’re thinking what? Buckle under? Put it off till summer?” I asked.
“No. They’re hoping that if we postpone it, I’ll ‘come to my senses’ and call it off. But I’m stymied, Ter. No church. No minister. What now?”
I pulled out Nossaman’s letter. “Here’s an idea from Allen: ‘Why in the hell don’t you two get married in Silverton? Jim Price says he’d be happy to officiate.’”
We stared at each other, eyes wide, as if we’d witnessed a miracle.
To Annie’s folks, our plan to get married in the desert—in the shadow of a saguaro rather than a cross—was blasphemy. Her mom had written her, “Annie, you simply have to have it in a church. It’s not a campout. It’s a wedding. It’s holy matrimony—a marriage before God.”
Not only was Jim Price one of our Silverton gang, he was an ordained minister, with a church. And it would be in the town we loved. “Why not?” I said. “Why the hell not?”
Annie nodded. “Yes, indeed. Let’s do it.”
Back at Annie’s apartment, we studied her school calendar as if it were a newly discovered Dead Sea Scroll. Rodeo Holiday, March 11–14, was the only break between Christmas and the end of the school year. That was it.
As soon as I got home, I fired off a letter to Allen. “You’re on. We’ve postponed the wedding. We’ll do it in Silverton. How does March 13 sound?”
Ann
Friday, December 25, 1964, Albuquerque. For Christmas, my folks invited family members who lived in New Mexico—my aunt and a swarm of first and second cousins—plus Grandma, Bonner, and me (fifteen in all). We gathered in klatches around the house, swapping stories of what we’d been up to, as Dad circulated, lubricating our conversations with short quips and his bottomless w
ine decanter. My aunt and cousins plied me with questions about Glendale. Mom would have called the gathering convivial, her highest compliment.
Disappointing would have been a better word. After the flurry of shopping, decorating, baking, cooking, gift giving, and dinner preparations, no one at the Christmas gathering—no one—asked about Terry. Not a word. Had Mom warned everyone the topic was off-limits? Probably not. She wouldn’t have disclosed our nuclear family’s strife to the assembled relatives. And they were too polite to ask if I even had a boyfriend. By day’s end, we all collapsed in front of our first-ever color TV and oohed and aahed at the novelty of it.
What really bothered me? With Thanksgiving still a raw memory, I didn’t have the heart to quash my folks’ joy at my decision not to marry at Christmas. I simply didn’t bring it up.
When I got back to Glendale, I wished I had broken the news that we were getting married—in March—so they would have had time to help me plan. I should have talked it through with them as a family, answered their every doubt.
But I didn’t. In a gutless effort to reestablish family unity, I bottled it up. I joined in the festivities, laughed and joked, and let the holiday slip by, leaving my parents in the dark about the looming wedding bearing down upon us.
Terry
January 1965, Glendale. The new year pranced in like a beneficent fairy godmother. I was editor of the News-Herald now, writing editorials, making assignments, and beginning to shape the paper into a Pulitzer Prize winner. I’d be the next William Allen White, and the News-Herald a modern Emporia Gazette. I was still single, but Annie and I had a wedding date.
My attorney had bought me time with the draft board. I still had to get the physical exam, but I could do it in Phoenix, not Colorado. It was set for February 8. The downside: The draft board had refused to change my classification. I was saddled with I-A, “Available for Military Service,” which meant that the board could—in spite or on a whim—draft me at any moment.
I had lived with that fear since November 18 when I refused to report to the courthouse in Colorado. To stave off the army, I’d quit answering my phone. I would take a different route to and from work every day and vary my coming and going times, always checking the neighborhood for cars I didn’t recognize to make sure the MPs hadn’t staked out the house. Some days I didn’t pick up my mail. I let it sit for a couple of days—hoping that any new orders from the draft board would spontaneously combust in the Arizona sun.
Friday, 15 January 1965, Glendale. Getting home after dark, I gathered the mail, unlocked the door, and rapped on the wall to scatter the roaches.
On Monday and Tuesday, I had interviewed the mayor and city council members—all seven of them, one by one—and stitched together a story that filled a third of the front page. “Where is Glendale going in 1965?” I asked. “What are our goals? What are our problems? How are we going to resolve them?”
I knew the problems before I asked. Housing crunch. Declining business district with a shrinking tax base. A population that had doubled between 1950 and 1960 and was on a trajectory to double again by 1970. I had spent my Friday fine-tuning an editorial calling on councilmen to pull their heads out of the sand and raise taxes. We couldn’t build a city of the future on the resources of the past.
First the mail, then I’d heat up a Banquet Chicken Pot Pie for dinner. Bank statement. Latest issue of Saturday Review. A nine-by-twelve envelope stamped with “Peace Corps Official Business.” The envelope looked like an oversized passport that had circled the globe, and in the process, it had crawled through the mud and been beaten up by thugs and run over by a semi. It had been forwarded to both places I lived in Boulder my last semester at CU and then rerouted to Center and finally to Glendale.
My hand shook. Inside, a letter from Sargent Shriver—the Peace Corps director himself. He said—oh my God!—“You have been chosen to train for a Peace Corps assignment overseas.”
The envelope included a canary yellow four-page brochure, “Thailand Peace Corps Program Description.” Shriver had invited me to Thailand. He wanted me to teach English there.
I didn’t even finish. I called Annie. “Hey, how about dinner at La Cocina? My treat.”
“It’s a little late, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but today’s a holiday. Besides, you shouldn’t be working on Friday night.”
“A holiday? Which one, pray tell? Saint Baloney’s birthday?”
“Yep, that’s it. It’s also an excuse. I want to see you. Isn’t that enough?”
Silence. Then, “Okay, give me ten minutes. You’ll pick me up?”
Between bites at La Cocina, we combed Sargent Shriver’s invitation. It was dated December 11—five weeks earlier. “Oh shit, listen to this: ‘Fill out the Invitation Acceptance Form and get it back to us within ten days.’ That was December 21. It’s too damn late.”
Annie studied it. “Yeah, but it’s not your fault. His letter proves they haven’t blackballed you, even after you turned down Venezuela.” She took another bite of her quesadilla and paused mid-chew. “You wouldn’t accept, though, not without me, would you? Don’t we have some kind of party or gala or something coming up? A whatchamacallit . . . a wedding?”
My mind was floating. Thailand! Wasn’t that Siam? Wow, Yul Brynner in The King and I. Me riding an elephant—they did that in Siam. The colorful brochure had a picture of a guy riding one. No doubt a Peace Corps volunteer. And a picture of a school complex with palm trees. I’d need to buy a hammock. “They want me to teach English,” I said. “Imagine that. We’ll have classrooms next to each other. We’ll use the same lesson plans. We’ll—of course I won’t go without you. I’ll tell Shriver, ‘You messed up with the mail. Send me two tickets.’”
“Yeah, you do that,” Annie said. “Tell him he owes us two tickets. Preferably first class. We’d better go home right now and start packing.”
I wrote a letter to Sargent Shriver over the weekend and mailed it Monday morning. I couldn’t accept, I told him, but only because Annie and I were about to be married, and we wanted to join as a couple. I explained the mail mix-up—nicely, no poke in the eye—urging him to give us another shot. Anywhere he wanted to send us. At the end, after thinking long and hard, I added another paragraph:
If for some reason my fiancée and I do not get married this summer, I would like to enter training alone. The Peace Corps is too important to me to risk losing the opportunities you have given me to join.
I didn’t show Annie the final draft. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. But I had to cover my bases. If I turned down the Peace Corps yet again, I’d never get another opportunity.
Ann
January 1965, Glendale. The new year flattened me like a steamroller. I had to write final exams and submit them to the principal the first week of the year. I was wiser now about essays but totally underestimated the time and energy needed to write short-answer exams—so many questions, so many ways to make them too hard or too easy. Then hours and hours of marking 140 tests, and a two-day marathon calculating semester grades.
As if that weren’t enough, I had rashly agreed to sponsor Glendale High’s chess club, which called for my supervision at weekly meetings and at the citywide tournament two full Saturdays in January. And I had finals for my own college classes. I crammed too late for the Arizona Constitution exam and was stung by my first-ever D. For Transformational Grammar, I squeezed the answers to my take-home final into the few remaining slivers of time in the last week of the term. That effort yielded me an A.
Soon after, I was blindsided by yowls from four seniors who flunked my class. English was required for graduation. One girl and her siblings lived with their father, who demanded everything of the kids and gave nothing back—so said the school counselor. Her mother was in the hospital charity ward, and the church was feeding the kids. With an F in English, the girl reportedly said, “I’ll quit school and get a job. At least my sisters can take lunch to school.”
The counsel
or insisted I change her grade. I couldn’t. Several other students were as close to passing as she was. How could I favor her over them? Word would get around, and I would be inundated with pleas for other changes. I told the counselor, “The most important thing I can teach is responsibility—changing my students’ grades won’t do that. Besides, it’s dishonest!”
But wasn’t their failure my failure? Distress over each failing student shredded my daytime focus and invaded my herky-jerky sleep. So did recurring worries about Terry, the draft, and our impending wedding—which I still hadn’t mentioned to my folks.
Terry
Monday, 6:30 a.m., 8 February 1965, Phoenix. There I was at the Armed Forces Examining Station, with a hundred other conscripts, all barefoot and in our undershorts, shuffling along colored lines from one corpsman to the next: Ears—check. Next station, please. Eyes—check. Next station, please. Mouth. Teeth. Heartbeat and pulse. Balls—turn your head and cough. Penis—yep, you’ve got one. Next station, please. Feet . . .
“Marshall, Terry Lee,” I said at each stop.
We were not a crowd or group or friends or even people at all. We were disembodied parts on an unstoppable slow-moving conveyor belt. Some recruits seemed eager, bursting with the pride of joining the army and fighting for their country. None knew I wasn’t one of them. We didn’t talk. We didn’t laugh. We didn’t even acknowledge each other. We followed orders. Next station, please.
At morning’s end, a soldier at the last table handed me a slip of paper and pointed to the exit. I trundled past and read it outside. Form DD 62, “Statement of Acceptability.” Beneath my name and address, a checked box: “Found fully acceptable for induction into the Armed Forces.” Signed by Bruce A. Cunningham, 2nd Lt., AGC. No salute needed.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 37
