The dance goes on and on
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
As a Scottish Presbyterian one would never doubt predestination, but who in their right mind would have ever figured this dance could have lasted 57 years and going on into eternity. It all started when a journalism professor, Lee B. McConnonville, a retired Los Angeles Times editor turned teacher, assigned a college newspaper reporter to escort the editor of that newspaper to a dance. Not very romantic, just another newspaper assignment.
The dance was called the Troi-Arts Ball, the social event of the year where the college department’s three art disciplines staged a formal dance. That was 57 years ago in Los Angeles. I was that reporter. My wife, Ada, was that editor.
Other than predestination how would you explain such an unlikely union, that a Southern boy from Georgia and a girl from Arizona would meet in a city like Los Angeles both studying journalism. After the dance we began dating and eventually decided to get married in June 1951, but only after I graduated and got job. President Harry Truman decided otherwise. I was a World War II GI student attending college and in the Marine Corps reserves. The Korean war suddenly erupted. I got orders to report for duty with the Marines.
Ada had already graduated magna cum laude from college and was working on the ground floor of a new medium called television. We decided to get married before I again put on Marine green and went off to war. The only day we both had free was Thanksgiving, Thursday, Nov. 23, 1950.
In the Memoirs we co-authored, Ada called it "a fairy tale romance." Most people thought it just a war time marriage between naive twenty somethings. Her mother scolded Ada for such an unrealistic decision saying she would be a widow before she was 25. My brother, the only relative I had living in California, wrote home his opinion that it wouldn’t last.
But it did and I didn’t die on some frozen terrain in Korea thousands of miles from Los Angeles. Eventually, I got my first job as a newspaper reporter earning $35 a week. Ada left a much better paying job in TV to follow this dreamer.
She became a mother and homemaker, while at times continuing to pursue her own journalism career. We ventured together as partners to buy and publish a weekly newspaper, called The Sun. It eclipsed, but not our marriage.
I continued to work as a reporter on daily newspapers in Los Angeles. We celebreated our tenth wedding anniversary while both on newspaper assignments aboard the last voyage of the Queen Mary, she as editor of the shipboard daily newspaper, The Ocean Bulletin, and me as a reporter for The Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. We had a dinner of Chautebriand with Cherries Jubilee for dessert in the elegant dining room aboard the Queen Mary, and later in the evening we also celebrated with the printers on C Deck in the bowels of the luxury ocean liner where Ada produced the daily newspaper. Crew members had scrubbed the ink off the stone on which they sat a spread of finger foods and egg salad sandwiches. When we returned to our stateroom we found a bottle of champagne iced in the bathoom lavatory, compliments of the City of Long Beach.
After that voyage, I had an opportunity to write a book about the Queen Mary and my partner, fully understanding that I had to take a leave from a full time job to accomplish this, agreed to go back to work as a reporter on a daily newspaper to support the family.
We have always been partners in every endeavor, not to mention parenting seven magnificent children.
I recently came across a quote by the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh:
"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."
That has been my Thanksgiving gift to my children for 57 years.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)