HOW WE MET

    At my last posting, I said I would write about how I met my husband.  We had nearly 55 years together.
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    World War II brought people together in sometimes dramatic ways, even within our own USA borders.
    My tall, handsome Bill arrived in the Buffalo NY train station one snowy night in 1945 and saw a big poster inviting all servicemen to our canteen.  He and his buddy, Duffy, decided to check it out as soon as they could.
    I was a hostess at that canteen.  The night they came, I was sitting at the top of the stairs taking names and home towns of the guests. At the bottom of the stairs, Bill nudged his buddy and said, “Duffy,  see that redhead? That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’
    “You’re crazy!” Duffy said, “You don’t even know her name.”
    Shortly after they signed in, I was relieved at the door and went in to the dance. I saw Bill standing in a doorway, so handsome in his Army Air Corps uniform. Grabbing a friend, I said, “Come with me, Clare, and just before we get near that tall, good-looking airman in the doorway, you shut up and let me talk.”
    I had no idea what I was going to say.  In 1945, even in a canteen girls didn’t boldly walk up and ask a guy to dance. (At least, not unless he had been holding up a wall for some time.)
    As I stepped by him I turned to Clare and said, “Yes, I’m the Amazon type.” That got his attention! I was a petite 5’2” and he was 6’3”.
    He promptly asked me to dance, and asked me to marry him as soon as we got on the dance floor.  “You’re crazy,” I laughed.  He sang the new popular song, “Candy” to me, then asked  me again. 
    And he kept asking each night he came to dance. We dated for about 3 weeks, until he was sent overseas, and wrote to each other  almost every day for the year he was gone.
    When the war was over and he came to Buffalo to see me, we sat up all night talking.  At about 4:00 am he asked me once again to marry him, and this time I said yes.  We decided to wait for my father to get up so he could ask for my hand. Dad slept an agonizingly long hour later than his usual 5:30 rising, and when we finally did hear him stirring, he disappeared into the bathroom to get ready for work. We thought he’d never come out!  When at last he did, Bill blurted out, “Mr Clarke, I’d like to marry your daughter.”
    “Well, Bill”, my father replied, “I’ve been expecting this, but not so damned early in the morning!”

            Postscript:
    About a year after the war, when we were expecting our first child, we read in Life Magazine that Duffy, who had stayed in service, had just been rescued from an ice floe where his plane had gone down. Bill contacted the police chief of his home town and asked him for Duffy’s address. Since it was near Christmas, Bill sent him a card and wrote on it,  “Dear Duffy, I married the redhead.”