In 1959 the Air Force assigned me to Duluth, at the airbase there, and it wasn’t long before I wanted to meet the local ladies.
One evening I heard that there was a St. Luke’s School of Nursing in Duluth. In time I came up with a phone number and called it and a girl answered. I told her I was with the Air Force and that myself and my buddies wanted to meet some local girls.
There was both joy and hesitancy at the other end. “We are not allowed to date people from the airbase,” I was told. So I asked what about if three of us got together with three of them and we went on a multi-couple picnic on Sunday to Jay Cooke State Park?
She said she’d ask around and then call me back.
One of my friends Dave was from Kansas and just came back from the Aleutian Islands and another Bob, had just come back off a tour serving on “Texas Towers.” These are like oil platforms out in the ocean and those tours were long and lonely. They were friends who also wanted to meet some girls and develop a social life.
The phone call came back, the picnic was on for Sunday.
Well, we stopped at a local store and bought picnic goodies, picked the girls up, and off we went to Jay Cooke State Park. We had a great time, the girl I dated was named Mary, the other girls were Marlis, and Jenny, identical twins.
In time Mary and I married, we had three children, she become a registered nurse in Minnesota, and we have now been married happily for 43 years. I went to work for IBM out east after I was discharged and then was sent to Rochester to work on the design of the IBM S/38.
Bob married Marlis, went to work for AT&T, and had two children and they are still married and living in Minneapolis in good health and spirits.
Dave was transferred to Okinawa after enlisting for another tour of duty and made the Air Force his career.
Duluth was cold in the winter and we were issued arctic gear to wear. Once I was pinned up against a chain-link fence for a good five minutes by wind-gusts whipping off of Lake Superior. An MP with a jeep came and helped me off the fence and into his jeep and dropped me off at the chow hall for a cup of “Minnesota Joe.”
We were told that survival time in Lake Superior was 13 minutes. Brrrr....
