HOW WE FIRST MET:Duane and I met when I was 15 and a Sophmore at Castro Valley High School. We attended the same church and I had just started going to the Sunday evening Luther League and I noticed this tall blonde cute guy with peach fuzz cheeks and bright blue eyes. He said he noticed my big blue eyes and red hair and he was hooked!The Monday after that fateful meeting Duane showed up at every class I had and carried my books to the next class. I don't know how he knew where I was but I he was resourceful.
Duane didn't have a car at that time and had to rely on borrowing his dad's 53 ford pickup. Most of the time we spent time together walking all over Castro Valley. I would go to the library at least once a week and Duane would carry home my ten plus books without complaint. I wondered why we always were walking, it wasn't till much later I learned that he was often on restriction for bad grades and he worked like the devil to get his grades up so he could borrow the truck for the school dances. His mother told me they thought I was a good influence on him because he brought his grades up and never was on restriction again, by the next report card period.
The school dances every Friday night were our favorite activity and we'd dance till they shut it down. I remember the wonderful old songs we loved, but nothing beat the song, The Twelfth of Never!
We got married one week before I graduated from high school in 1960. We were very independent and since Duane was one year ahead of me in school already out and working, we thought we were so grown up and able to make our own decisions.
Our honeymoon was at Yosemite for a week. We had $5.00 and a full ice chest full of food and a tent. We drove up to the mountains and had to stop for the night near Groveland, because the park wasn't open at night. Of course we didn't have money for a room anywhere so we drove our 55 ford sedan into an open field and spent the night. The next morning there were several hundred cows around our car looking in the window and watching us sleep. It was an amazing sight!
We bought breakfast for 2 refilled the car with gas and still had a couple of dollars for the week in Yosemite Valley. The park wasn't managed the way it is now and we had to wait for someone to leave before we could put up our tent right next to several others. There was only enough room to put it up tent stake to tent stake with neighbors all around. We did enjoy the nightly fire-falls it was beautiful but a long ago memory now, with all of the environmental issues they couldn't let fire fall from the top near half dome now days.
We arranged to meet friends at a reservoir on our way home and spent a day in a row boat together. We started out with four rowing paddle ores, but by the time the guys finished using them to knock down dirt in the channel a fun activitiy but I'm sure it wasn't acceptable behavior on the water, we lost two of them and because the wind came up we put a blanket between them and sailed back to the cars. Needless to say the going was slow and by the time we got back to the car we were sunburned to the blister stage.
It's been an adventure of world travel and now gold mining in the Sierra Nevada Mts. We travel six months every year and I write whenever I can get some time to put my thoughts down. My first novel Without Consent is now out and is a soft cover as well as an e-book. Now I'm dragging Duane to book signings and interesting places I want to research for my next novel.
We are the parents of three children and four grandchildren. I was able to raise my children without having to work, however, I always worked from home. I became a reporter and feature story writer for the Daily Review, went to college and got my Master's in Clinical Psychology and became a Social Worker. Duane was fortunate that he was able to work for a crane manufacturer and learned the crane business from the ground up and eventually be came the company representative all over the world, supervising the installation of the cranes by foreign crews. It's been a happy and satisfying life and I feel given that we were so young when we started out that we were very lucky and grateful to be celebrating our 52nd wedding anniversary, through thick and thin.