by Si Robertson
“I’ve got just the person for you,” he told her.
“There’s no way you know anyone with all of those attributes,” she said.
Hey, Christine Raney didn’t know the real Silas Merritt Robertson. I was eight for eight, Jack!
My buddy set us up on a blind date. Well, at least she was blind going into the date. I knew who I was taking out, but my buddy didn’t tell her she was going out with me. He knew how she felt about me after they picked me up hitchhiking. I decided to take Christine to our company’s Christmas party at Fort Devens on December 12, 1969. She picked my buddy and me up at our barracks. As soon as Christine saw me, she was convinced it was going to be the worst night of her life. She couldn’t remember my name, but she remembered my face. How could anyone forget a face like mine?
Of course, I turned on my charm and we had a great time. Christine said she’d never laughed so hard in her life. I amazed her with my dancing skills, of course, and we started dating regularly pretty soon thereafter.
Christine was born and raised in Kentucky, where her father was a farmer. She loved living in Massachusetts. She’d moved there when she was twenty-one and was working as a seamstress in a factory that made furniture upholstery.
After a couple of years of dating, I was ready to pop the big question. I knew she was the one. My enlistment in the army was about to expire, and I knew I was moving back to Louisiana. I wanted to take Christine with me.
Before I proposed to Christine, I called Momma to tell her the news. I knew Momma and Daddy wouldn’t be happy that Christine had been married before. My family didn’t believe in divorce. We believed that when you made a vow of marriage, you were supposed to spend the rest of your life with your spouse. I was taught that when you chose a husband or wife, you were making a commitment for the rest of your life. But it wasn’t Christine’s decision for her first marriage to end.
“Hey, I’ve got a little news,” I told Momma. “I’m fixing to get married. Her name is Christine. She was married before, so I want to make sure you will accept her as your daughter-in-law.”
There was a short pause on the other end of the telephone. I was getting a little anxious.
“Yes, I’ll accept her,” Momma said.
“Good,” I said. “This is the woman I’m going to marry. If you can’t accept her, I’m not going to be around, either.”
“You ought to know better than that,” Momma said. “I will accept her.”
On April Fools’ Day, 1971, I told Christine’s best friend that I was going to ask her to marry me. Of course, I was only kidding at the time. Five days later, on the same day I was released from the army, I asked Christine to marry me. Much to my surprise, she told me no.
And then she told me no again—and again and again and again.
Christine didn’t want to marry me because she knew she couldn’t have children.
“I can’t be your broodmare,” she said.
“Hey, I’m not like your first husband,” I told her. “There are other doctors out there. If God wants us to have children, we’ll have children. If he doesn’t want us to have children, we’ll adopt some kids. I want to marry you.”
Finally, after I’d pestered Christine for nearly a full day, she agreed to marry me. We went to see the justice of the peace the next day.
On April 7, 1971, we were married at the courthouse. Because I was leaving the army, the judge even waived the state’s requirement of having a five-day waiting period, marriage license, and blood test before a couple could be married.
When we were standing in front of the judge, he said to me, “Son, you just got out of a three-year commitment. Are you sure you want another one?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him.
I knew this commitment was for the rest of my life.
Christine and I exchanged our vows and became husband and wife.
“There’s some people who got it. And some people who don’t. Hey, I’ve always had it!”
My first impression with Christine wasn’t much, but I knocked her socks off once she realized I was a modern-day Fred Astaire!
Newlyweds
AS SOON AS CHRISTINE and I were married, we jumped into my 1966 Plymouth Fury and drove straight to her parents’ home in Kentucky. We were headed to Louisiana, but we stopped there so her parents could meet me. On the way to the courthouse the morning we were married, Christine said I wouldn’t stop talking. But she said I barely said a word during the drive from Massachusetts to Kentucky. I guess I was in shock from actually going through with marriage.
We arrived at her parents’ home late at night, and I didn’t meet them until the next morning.
“Boy, y’all must have been tired,” her momma said.
“What were you expecting to hear, Momma?” Christine asked her. “The bedsprings squeaking?”
Thankfully, her parents’ house had thick walls.
Hey, Christine was in for a rude awakening when we arrived in Louisiana. I told her she was going to meet my family at a get-together at my brother Harold’s house in Ruston, Louisiana. I don’t think she realized she was going to meet my entire family. It wasn’t like, “Hey, meet Momma and Daddy.” It was more like, “Hey, meet my entire family and all of the in-laws.”
My grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins were there, along with practically anyone else who had a spot on our family tree. Christine is a very shy person, and she was worried about meeting my parents, let alone everyone else. There were more than twenty people at the impromptu reunion. She was really taken aback at how loud and competitive we were while playing games like dominoes and solitaire. She barely spoke a word the entire day—not that she had much of a chance to say anything.
Hey, welcome to the Robertson family.
Fortunately, Christine won over my momma pretty easily. She actually wrote my mother letters thanking her for me. Christine thought she’d gotten the best of the bunch of Momma’s boys. Was there ever any doubt? In our first year of marriage, Momma told Christine how happy she was that I’d married her. Momma thought Christine was the perfect wife for me. I was really happy Momma liked her.
In April 1971, Christine and I moved to Junction City, Arkansas, which is where Phil and Kay were living at the time. It was during Phil’s struggles with alcohol and drugs, so it was really a wild time to be around him. As I said earlier, I quit drinking alcohol shortly after I came back from Vietnam. Once I met Christine, I stopped drinking altogether. But Phil was operating a honkytonk and was drinking all the time.
Christine did not like Phil very much in the beginning. In fact, she despised it when I went hunting or fishing with him, which was usually every day. She didn’t like the fact that Phil was taking other women on his fishing and hunting trips while he was married to Kay. Phil was my big brother, and I still loved him. But it was very difficult for me to see him go through his struggles. To be honest, Phil was not a very good person until he found Jesus Christ when he was twenty-eight years old. But he repented his sins and is spending the rest of his life sharing God’s Word.
Much to my surprise, I had a difficult time after I left the military. When I was in Vietnam, I couldn’t wait to get back to the United States. When I was in Massachusetts, I couldn’t wait to get back to Louisiana. But once I was closer to home and around my parents, brothers, and sisters again, I was bored out of my mind. I was different from a lot of guys in the military. I put a uniform on every morning when I went to work, but I took it off when I came home. It was more of a job to me than a career. But I liked that I had a lot of free time in the military, which allowed me to hunt and fish. After we moved to Arkansas, I worked a nine-to-five shift in a particleboard factory, and I didn’t make much money. I was usually too tired to do the things I liked doing in the outdoors.
In August 1971, Christine and I moved to Ruston, Louisiana. For whatever reason, I decided to go back to school on a GI Bill, which paid my tuition and helped pay for our living expenses as lon
g as I was in college. I took classes at Louisiana Tech University—the administration was more than happy to welcome back one of its honor students—and worked from three o’clock to midnight five days a week. I worked in a broom factory for about two months, but then the owner fired me because his nephew needed a job.
Since I was married, I needed a job to support my wife. The GI Bill didn’t cover everything. Fortunately, the Ruston police department was looking to hire a radio operator. Back then there was no such thing as 911, at least not in Ruston, so I was in charge of handling all the emergency calls at night, as well as being a dispatcher for the police officers who were on patrol. You wouldn’t believe some of the calls we received! One time, a guy called me and told me his wife was in labor.
“Her contractions are only two minutes apart,” he said.
“Is this her first child?” I asked.
“No, you idiot, this is her husband!” he told me.
Hey, another time a guy called me from a pay phone and told me he was having trouble breathing.
“Sir, where are you located?” I asked.
“I’m at the corner of West Kentucky Avenue and South Chautauqua Road,” he said.
“Are you asthmatic?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
“Well, what were you doing when you started having trouble breathing?” I asked.
“Running from the police,” he said.
It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t want to pursue a career in criminal justice. It wasn’t very long before I started losing interest in attending college, too. I was enrolled at Louisiana Tech for more than a year, but I just couldn’t see myself staying in college for three more years. Five days a week, I was attending classes in the morning, working at night, and studying before and after I went to work. Hey, I figured out I was working a lot less and making a lot more money when I was in the military!
Before too long, Christine could sense my frustration. I’m not an angry person and really don’t have much of a temper, but she could see that I wasn’t the same happy-go-lucky guy I was when I was in the army. One night after work, she sat me down in our living room.
“Are you happy going to school and working at night?” she asked me.
“No, not really,” I said.
“Well, I have a question,” she said. “Were you happier in the military than you are here?”
“Yeah, I really enjoyed the military,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you go back into the army?” she said.
In November 1972, Christine and I drove to the army recruiter’s office in Shreveport, Louisiana. They agreed to take me back, and I enlisted that same day. When I signed my contract to go back into the army, I made the recruiter specify that I would spend at least sixteen months at Fort Knox, which is about thirty-five miles from Louisville, Kentucky. I figured Fort Knox was pretty close to Christine’s parents, and it would also ensure that the army wouldn’t send me back to Vietnam or another foreign country.
Uncle Sam kept his word. We stayed at Fort Knox for sixteen months. On the first day of the seventeenth month, I got my orders to go back overseas.
“This is just the icing on the tip of the iceberg!”
Hey, the Germans required me to dress pretty sharp for our hunts. Can you imagine me wearing these duds in Phil’s duck blind?
God’s Blessing
ONE OF THE FIRST things I did when I arrived at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was make an appointment for Christine to see a fertility doctor. The military doctor started working with us in December 1972, and he eventually told Christine that he could fix it to where she wouldn’t experience any more pain, but he still wasn’t sure if we could have children.
A few years earlier, Christine had been diagnosed with Asherman’s syndrome, which is a rare condition that causes scarring on the uterus; more than 95 percent of her uterus was covered in scars. The condition can cause infertility and miscarriages and is sometimes very painful. When Christine was working, she often missed at least a couple of days of work every month because she was in excruciating pain.
Christine had surgery in July 1973 to remove the scarring from her uterus. Fortunately, the procedure eliminated her pain, but we still weren’t sure whether we could have children. The doctors told us to keep trying to get pregnant for a year, and we had to closely monitor when she was ovulating. Well, nothing happened in the first nine months after her surgery. The doctors thought everything was fine with Christine, so they wanted to examine me to see if everything was okay. Hey, I didn’t want to go see a doctor. Doctors and I go together like peanut butter and Dijon mustard. We don’t get along, Jack! I remember when Momma took me to the doctor for the first time because I was having trouble with my eyes. For a few weeks, everything was really blurry, and I was bumping into walls, tables, chairs, dogs, grizzly bears, and anything else that was in my way.
“Mrs. Robertson, your son needs to stop drinking iced tea,” the doctor said. “It’s bad for his vision.”
“Hey, I love iced tea,” I said. “I don’t care if I go blind. I’m drinking tea, Jack!”
“Well, at least take the spoon out of the cup before you drink it,” he said.
Christine was ready to have a baby, so she really wanted me to visit the doctor to find out what was going on. I wanted to have children badly as well, so I agreed to go. After an examination, the doctors thought my sperm count might be low. They handed me a glass jar and told me to bring back a specimen the next day. Now, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t feel comfortable doing it. Despite my embarrassment, I agreed to come back with a specimen. The next day, I returned to the doctor’s office.
“Where’s the sample?” the doctor asked me.
“Hey, I tried to do it,” I told him. “But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it. I asked my wife for help, but I still couldn’t do it. Then I asked my neighbor to help me, and I even asked my army buddies for assistance. No matter who helped, I couldn’t do it.”
I looked at the doctor and his face was bright red.
“Hey, none of us could get the lid off the jar,” I said.
We found out that my sperm count was very low. Hey, they were Grade A sperm, but there weren’t enough of them. The doctors discovered that my body temperature was too warm because I was always wearing tight shorts, kind of like the low-cut ones football coaches used to wear on the sideline. I liked to wear them because they really showcased my legs. To fix the problem, I started wearing boxer shorts and sweatpants. Christine and I went back to trying to have a baby.
In April 1974, when my sixteen-month enlistment at Fort Knox was about to expire, the army notified me that I was being deployed to Baumholder, Germany. The Baumholder post was an old Nazi garrison located in southwest Germany, just east of the French border. Before World War II, the Nazis displaced hundreds of families to build a military training ground that covered nearly thirty thousand acres. During World War II, Baumholder was also the site of a prisoner-of-war camp that housed prisoners from the Soviet Union, Poland, and other countries.
In March 1945, Baumholder surrendered to the Americans without a fight, and it became a French military outpost. In 1951, the U.S. army took over the outpost and built schools, houses, churches, and warehouses for more than four thousand troops and their families. Until recent military cutbacks, Americans outnumbered the Germans living in Baumholder by nearly three to one. It really was a beautiful area. Rolling hills surrounded Baum-holder, and it had bars, dance halls, and music halls from its medieval roots. It was located in the middle of Germany’s wine country, and Austria, Belgium, France, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Bavarian Alps were within a few hours’ drive. Hey, it was a lot different from Louisiana and Vietnam!
I left for Germany in May 1974, and Christine joined me there about three months later. In December 1974, Christine became very ill. She thought she had the flu. Sharon Sawyer, the woman living next to door to us on the military base, encouraged her to take a preg
nancy test.
“I know I’m not pregnant,” Christine said. “There’s no need to go.”
“Do it for me,” Sharon told her. “Please do it for me. You never know.”
Sharon persuaded Christine to go to the military hospital and take a pregnancy test. Later that day, Sharon asked her to call the hospital to find out the results.
“I’m not even going to call,” Christine told her. “I know I’m not pregnant. I know it’s going to be negative.”
Without Christine’s knowing, Sharon called the doctor’s office and pretended to be her.
After a few minutes, Christine heard her say: “What do you mean do I want to keep the baby? Of course I’m keeping the baby!”
Sharon walked into the living room of our apartment and shouted: “We’re pregnant! We’re pregnant!”
When I found out Christine was pregnant, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I always knew if God wanted us to have children, He would make it happen. If He didn’t want us to have kids, we wouldn’t have them. I have always left those kinds of things up to the Almighty, and I’ve always known I’ve had no control over them.
When I first asked Christine to marry me, she told me, “No, I won’t marry you. I’ve seen you around children and you love them. You need to have kids. You want to have kids.”
Even though I would have been perfectly happy adopting kids or living with Christine without them, I’d always wanted children of my own. I loved being around Phil’s boys when they were babies, and I really wanted a chance to spread our love with children of our own. As it says in Psalms 113:9: “He settles the childless woman in her home as a happy mother of children. Praise the Lord.”
Hey, the next eight months were the most anxious days of my life as I waited for my baby to arrive.
