MOTORING MEMORIES
Logistics of a tight schedule are undone by winter’s blast.
Snow dampened his plans
Right out of high school in 1943, I went to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, for the Navy’s V-12 Program. At Christmas we got only six days’ leave, making it tough to get home. Flying was too expensive—only the really rich flew in those days—and I didn’t have a car. I rode my thumb when I went to Chapel Hill to see Martha Faison, the current love of my life, but I couldn’t do that for nearly a thousand miles home to Aurora, Illinois. A train trip would allow only three days there, which hardly seemed worth it. But that’s what I did.
I got home on Christmas Eve. A member of shore patrol had stopped me in Union Station in Chicago because I was wearing a white hat—out of uniform up north in winter—but he let me go when I showed him my orders that I came from down south.
Christmas at home with my parents, Paul and Marie, and sister, Elsie, was wonderful. They were surprised—and disappointed—that I had plans to leave in the evening to visit my high school sweetheart, Lorrie McFarland, for the rest of my time. It started snowing in the afternoon and was piling up by the time I started for West Chicago to see her. A few miles out of town, I realized I was driving in a snowstorm. After I passed a second car in the ditch I turned around and went back home.
In hindsight, I was very selfish to even consider spending half my short leave with a girlfriend, and I have to chuckle when I think about that nutty 17-year-old sailor heading off into a storm to see a 16-year-old girl. I never saw Lorrie again: As happens with most teenage love affairs, by the time I left active duty in 1945, she and I had moved on.