The New Bride Travels

Last week I told you about us eloping and I was only 16 years old.  It was March 18, 1945 and on March 21 John returned to his base in Pratt, Kansas.  I stayed here and graduated from Geraldine High School and by the middle of June 1 I had a job in Pelham and lived with my sister in Talladega.  She had twins born that April and it was a thrill to be with those little ones.  By then John had been transferred to Jamaica.

On June 19 I received a call that he was back and was now stationed in Hastings, Nebraska and he wanted me to come there.  Duh!  Here I was 16 years old and had no travel experience (and very little of any other kind LOL).  So I had to give a notice at the workplace and get organized for travel.  I can only imagine how  my parents worried.  There were no phones and they had to wait for a letter.

Sis had a black lady, Lizzie,  helping her with the twins and they helped get me ready to embark on my journey.  They pinned $60 I my bra and packed a picnic lunch in a shoebox.  I traveled by bus — leaving Talladega at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday.  As luck would have it, I missed my connection in Birmingham.  John had an aunt there and I called her.  She was gracious enough to come down and take me to a movie while I waited the 4 hours.

I was fast asleep by the time the bus reached Tupelo and when I woke up I asked in a loud voice — “Is this Tupelo, Alabama?”  Dumb kid!  Well I traveled and traveled changing buses in such place as St. Louis and Kansas City.  How in the world I ever made it is beyond me.  As I traveled along in Kansas, the wheat swayed in the wind and I got motion sickness.  I had to bump along on that old bus with my eyes closed ’til dark arrived.

Now Sis had sent John a telegram about my time of arrival; however, she did not tell the mode of transportation.  He had rented us a bedroom (and nothing else) in Harvard and I arrived there at 9:00 p.m. on Saturday night.  Remember I had been traveling since Wednesday — no bath – no change of clothes.  I ate my shoebox lunch very sparingly and spent fifty cents on that trip.  The bus station was in the back of a drugstore and I was taken back to see the “black only” restrooms and drinking fountains.  This was a new sight for a youngster from Sand Mountain.  Where I lived there were no black people.  John was not there to meet me!!  Scared was an understatement.  The place was crawling alive with service men, but no John.  I thought I saw him enter a café just down the street, but by the time I went to the restroom, got my suitcase settled and walked down there he was no where to be seen.  Would you believe he had been in there about that time — drank a glass of milk and went back to the train station to wait!!

At the suggestion of an older man who worked behind the counter at the drugstore, I went across the street and rented a room in the hotel!!  That building was a two-story wooden structure — an accident just waiting to happen!!  I had to go down the hall a good ways to get to the bathroom!!  Needless to say, I fell asleep immediately.  I was awakened at 5:00 a.m. by someone calling my name.  John had climbed up on a chair and was throwing keys, etc. through the transom trying to get me awake..  He said (notice I said, “He said”)  he had been at the train station all night and a lady with two small children came in and her husband was not there to meet her. He helped her get to the hotel.  If that’s true, how in the world did he see my name on the register? Oh well, so much for that.

It was then that we really started our life together —   it was not country living.