A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties

by Terry Marshall

  I had spent the previous summer in Silverton, working at the Silverton Standard for my friend, Allen Nossaman, who had been editor in chief of the Colorado Daily the year I was city editor. After he graduated from CU, he bought the Standard with the goal of creating a prize-winning newspaper. But the town was too small for the business to survive on subscribers alone. He printed the paper on Thursday nights and spent Fridays, Mondays, and many a weekend turning out stationery, business forms, and flyers—all the printing needs of a small town. I was his partner that summer.

  I’d also found in Silverton a band of eclectic but like-minded friends, who became as tightly knit a group as our gang at the Colorado Daily. Take John Ross, a hard-drinking bear of a man with a full beard and the presence of an 1870s roustabout who taught high school math. He put me up all summer in his spare bedroom. He had restored a World War II Burma Jeep with six wheels and the roar of a tank and enjoyed taking us up trails only he believed were passable.

  And Roger Craig, a wiry cowboy from the plains west of Durango. Roger owned the West’s ugliest cowboy boots—screaming yellow with flaming red polka dots—so ugly they provoked fights every time he wore them into a bar, which he did just for fun.

  In what little time was left after my marathon days at the Standard, I explored the surrounding San Juan Mountains, sometimes with this gang of adventurers, sometimes alone.

  After each outing that summer, be it a solo walk up a hillside, a jeep trip, or a mountain hike, I wrote to my junior-year girlfriend, Steffi, eager to revive our dormant romance after she moved to San Francisco. I built her into each experience—sights that inspired us and smells, sounds, and thoughts as we trudged up a trail under the weight of our packs. We pitched snowballs at each other. We made love in my sleeping bag under a canopy of brilliant stars. I wove fact and fiction until I could sense her beside me, hoping she could feel it too.

  Those conjured liaisons amped up my horniness, and her letters kept hope alive. But by mid-July, her new life in San Francisco had won her over. She quit writing.

  The chances of meeting someone in Silverton were slim. The tourists left for Durango late every afternoon, and at night, the place was as desolate as an abandoned mine. There weren’t any coeds—not one—and I dismissed the local high school girls as mere children. That was the sad underbelly of my summer: night after night alone, weeks without female companionship. At times I was so lonely for a woman’s touch I didn’t think I could survive until fall.

  But then came July 27, 1963, a Saturday. I was at the Linotype, Allen at the hand-fed press. A gaggle of tourists clattered into the Standard office. Usually I ignored them, but that day, this gorgeous girl swished behind the counter. My God, Laura Lee Christensen!

  She had been a year behind me in high school, not in Center but in Smoky Point, forty-five minutes away. She was the editor of her school newspaper, and we’d met at an annual workshop for San Luis Valley high school journalists. When I started at CU, she and I struck up a correspondence—flirty, suggestive letters. She promised to join me at CU after graduation.

  I had last seen her the following summer when I worked for the Valley Courier in Alamosa. We went to a small-town rodeo banquet I had to cover. That was the first time I’d dared to ask her out. In high school, she was a New York Yankee, and I was a minor leaguer. She was stunning, bright, sophisticated, and two inches taller than me. After the banquet, we slipped away and talked for a couple of hours. Great conversation, but at my every timid touch, she nudged my hand away. Each time I edged in to kiss her, she turned aside.

  I called her at the end of the week. Her mother said, “She moved away. “Don’t call us again.” That fall, I learned that Laura Lee had been two months pregnant the night of our date, and when her parents found out, they demanded she marry the guy immediately. Calling her vile names, they kicked her out of the house and refused to attend her quickly arranged wedding in Taos.

  Three years later, Laura Lee showed up at the Standard, her throaty purr buckling my knees. “Terry! God, it’s been so long.” Our eyes locked, hers so intense I feared she could see my lust. Our words puffed out in whispers, as if we were captives and our kidnappers hovered nearby. I learned this much: She had divorced the father of her child and was living with her parents in Delta, eighty miles from Silverton. The “gaggle of tourists” were her two-year-old daughter, her parents, sister, and—oh no, not again—fiancé. They’d set a wedding date: November 9.

  “Let’s go!” her dad shouted.

  Laura Lee jumped like a marionette. I followed her out the door. Halfway down Greene Street, she looked back and gave a seductive wave. I dashed after her, got her address, and stood rooted, watching her until they disappeared into the Grand Imperial for lunch.

  I’d always been shy around girls, fearful that if I made the slightest amorous move, they’d embarrass me with a slap in the chops. But that night I mustered the chutzpah to write Laura Lee, “You can’t get married. You must go to the university. And we can’t part with what little we have had. I’m coming to see you. Soon.”

  Imagine asking this girl to call off her wedding—based on a fifteen-minute chance meeting three years after our only date. If that weren’t enough, I tried to convince her we were destined to be together.

  In a flurry of letters, I urged her to come to CU. She wrestled with how to raise a child by herself and still pursue her college dream. My letters went from “Dear Laura” to “My Dear Laura,” and hers from “Dear Terry” to “My Terry” to “My Darling.”

  Two weeks after our chance meeting, I drove to her place in Delta for the weekend. Despite her parents’ pit-bull surveillance and her daughter’s cute but incessant need for attention, Laura Lee and I carved out time alone, talking, talking—the pain of teen motherhood and divorce, our hopes for the future, the scandal that calling off a wedding would cause. “Come to Boulder and live with me,” I blurted out.

  I expected outrage, but she kissed me, hugging me so tightly we melted together. I couldn’t imagine myself as a father, yet we talked about day care in Boulder, about apartment hunting, and about how I would look after our little girl when Laura Lee was in class. When I left for Silverton Monday morning, she seemed poised to join me that fall at CU.

  Our letters resumed. “No! I shouldn’t,” she wrote. “I can’t. I must not. I won’t. I’ve gone too far down this path to turn back. I have to stick to the course I’ve chosen.” Still, she pleaded with her parents to postpone the wedding for college. Her mother’s response: “You’re a tramp!” Her father said “sure”—if she would pick up the phone, right that instant, cancel the wedding, tell her fiancé she’d never see him again, and “break his heart.”

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t hurt them like that,” she wrote.

  I had planned to leave Silverton at the end of August and spend a week in Salt Lake City before school started. “Come with me,” I wrote.

  She wrote back, “We’re not capable of a platonic relationship, and even if we were, no one would believe it.” But she’d think about it, she said. In the interim, I proposed a rendezvous in Ouray, a small town between Delta and Silverton.

  We met on Wednesday, three days before I was to leave for Salt Lake, and spent the morning in the town park. We reaffirmed our love, revisiting the same hopes we’d expressed in Delta, but with none of the brain-wracking agony we’d wrestled with, as if we had come to terms with events neither of us wanted but couldn’t avoid. We touched discreetly. No soul-searching kisses, no wandering hands.

  Mostly, we tended her daughter, me scooping her up, swinging her, racing with her, hugging her, laughing. She was irresistible, but insatiable. I loved that little kid. But, God, she was a full-time job. How would Laura Lee and I ever be able to both raise her and get any studying done? I pushed that fear aside. “Come with me to Salt Lake,” I said. “Just you. At least we can have one week together.”

  She might, she said. She’d let me know by Friday, the day before I left for Salt La
ke.

  On my way back to Silverton, a downpour pelted the windshield before I reached the summit of Red Mountain Pass. My windows fogged over. I inched into a rare pullout at the edge of a cliff, only half a car wide. I flipped on the radio and heard Walter Cronkite’s avuncular voice, “. . . presenting Miss Mahalia Jackson.”

  The March on Washington!

  Mahalia Jackson sang, “I’ve been ’buked and I’ve been scorned . . .” The crowd roared—two hundred thousand people, Cronkite said. A rabbi spoke. Martin Luther King Jr. came to the podium. Through the static, he cried, “Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells.”

  I responded, “And me from the arms of Laura Lee Christensen, a girl who loves me.” The rain stopped. I sat there and soaked in every word.

  King wasn’t a stranger to me. His Stride Toward Freedom had provided the intellectual basis for my claim to be classified a conscientious objector. But I had never heard him speak. He poured similes over metaphors and wrapped them in allegories. He knew when to pause, when to repeat, when to shout, when to whisper. He boomed, “Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York . . . from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado.” He called to me. Directly to me! There in the snowcapped San Juan Mountains of the Colorado Rockies.

  I drove on to Silverton in euphoria. Laura Lee had rescued my summer. She loved me, and I her. If she did come with me to Salt Lake, we’d sleep together every night for a week, no question. And then she’d join me at CU. We’d live together. Life would be complete.

  On top of that, King had touched me anew. I hadn’t done enough for civil rights. I’d lost my way since I left the Colorado Daily. I’d make him proud, I vowed.

  In Silverton, Friday’s mail brought a brief, sad note. No, she wouldn’t go with me to Salt Lake. But hope lived on. She wasn’t sure she could go through with the November 9 wedding. “I think my head will split with aching,” she wrote. “I can’t decide. Give me until October 1.”

  In Salt Lake I floated in the briny water. Alone. Hiked a trail behind the university. Alone! At Temple Square’s grand Tabernacle, I slipped inside and sat mesmerized as Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded a Christmas album with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. With Laura Lee it would have been the date of a lifetime. But I was alone.

  When the first of October came, I knew before I slit open the familiar light blue envelope that Laura Lee’s answer wasn’t what I wished for. My hands shook. I stared at her handwriting to get it into focus. “I promised I’d write before October 1,” she wrote, “and I’ve waited as long as I could, hoping to the last minute I could give you the right answer, but I can’t.”

  The wedding was on.

  “Oh, Terry, I tried so hard and prayed so much, but it’s impossible.” She’d tried to convince her parents she should go to school, but she couldn’t. And she hadn’t been able to summon the strength to call off the wedding herself. “Thank you, Terry,” she wrote, “for listening and for at least giving me a hope for escape. I wish we could have done together all the things we both need to do.” She signed it “Yours, Laura Lee.”

  I plowed on better than I had thought possible. I had loved Laura Lee, and she hadn’t rejected me. We’d simply rediscovered each other too late to reverse the forces already set in motion. I’d been blessed. In only five crazy, improbable, heart-wrenching weeks, Laura Lee had taught me how to love.

  But all that philosophizing aside, her letter hurt like hell!

  Now, ten months later, as I drove into Silverton from Center, I feared that every step I took would rekindle some memory of Laura Lee.

  I quickly discovered, though, that I was aching not for the girl I’d lost a year ago but for Ann Garretson. That night I couldn’t sleep for thoughts of her. The next day, it was Annie’s image that made me lose track of where I was on the trail up Kendall Peak. I was thinking about her when I drifted across the centerline at that first hairpin curve above Silverton. She was everywhere. I couldn’t take a breath without her. And the damn postmaster was no help at all. Annie couldn’t write me there. She had no idea where I was.

  Ann

  Thursday, June 25, 1964, Lausanne, Switzerland. Two weeks in Europe, and this was my first day at a beach—Lake Geneva. I’d brought my darling bathing suit, a shimmery one-piece that laid bare my back and had a plunging neckline that betrayed a bit of cleavage but kept my breasts safely in check.

  Even my little brother, Jimmy, had whistled when he saw me. I’d worn it in public only once. At home the previous summer, I had glided from the pool dressing room, using every move I’d mastered in the Cover Girl modeling course that my parents had sent me to in 1960. Imagining that every stud had his eyes on me, I headed for the high board, the domain of fearless performers—guys, of course—not the piddly, inches-above-the-water springboard my girlfriends settled for.

  Bounding up the ladder, I slipped on step four, bashed my shin on the metal lip, swallowed a shriek of pain, and staggered to the top. I posed like a cliff diver at Acapulco. And did the world’s worst belly flop. I acted as if I had knifed into the water like a gold medalist. But I couldn’t breathe. My kamikaze landing had smacked every molecule of air out of me. My gouged shin was aflame. My body stung as if I’d wallowed in a field of nettles. I was mortified. That pathetic dive sent me spiraling into sex symbol oblivion. And the wound left me with a permanent dent in my shin.

  But in Lausanne, even wizened octogenarians and triple-chinned behemoths wore bikinis. If I were so clueless as to wear my old-maid one-piece, I’d probably get arrested for public decency. Only trouble was, I had never, ever worn a bikini. And I’d never, ever planned to. Until that day. In a Lausanne department store changing room, I glared at the image of a girl who looked a lot like me, wearing a Day-Glo yellow hint of a bathing suit. I cringed at what I saw.

  Why? My tummy pooched out like Winnie the Pooh’s. It wasn’t fat, just poochie. Normally, it took all my will—and a girdle—to curb the pudginess. Dad had attributed it to poor posture. “Stand up straight, Sis. Walk like a woman.”

  I selected another bikini from among the colorful bits of cloth I’d arrayed on the bench. I squared my shoulders, stretched to my full height, took a deep breath, and sucked in my tummy. I couldn’t make it go flat. Simply put, I was an ugly duckling, with no chance of turning into a swan.

  It was just as I had always thought—except for a shining moment in my freshman year of high school when we lived in Italy. On a teen club excursion to Florence, my girlfriend Judy and I tripped merrily through the Uffizi Gallery and came face-to-face with Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. I stopped cold, not because of the angelic face or luscious curls, but because of her poochie tummy. She was me, at least her tummy was. Botticelli knew that girls were naturally curved, not flat bellied or washboard rippled. His art liberated me.

  But back in the States a year later, my newfound confidence vanished when my girlfriends argued over who cut the most svelte profile. I again succumbed to the American narrative that girls with poochie tummies were doomed to dateless weekends.

  Enough of that old self-doubt! In the tiny Swiss dressing room, I tried on a modern ’60s persona—and another candidate bikini. I looked over my shoulder at my fanny. Not a bad view there, and I gave up trying to hide that poochie tummy.

  But there was something worse. Far worse.

  A tangle of fugitive pubic hair.

  Yep, like runaway Virginia creepers, my pubic hair sprawled beyond the bikini line. For practical reasons, I rarely whacked it off. A full-scale assault was unbearable. Afterward, it itched like crazy. My panties would rub the exposed skin raw, and I’d sprout an acre of angry red bumps. As for waxing, it required nerves of steel and the pain tolerance of a pit bull. I couldn’t pour hot wax on Genghis Khan storming the castle wall, let alone on the most delicate part of my body. But the hot wax is a minor part of the pain. Next you have to rip it off, along with patches of hair—as if it were invasive weeds—and layers of skin. Talk about bar
baric!

  Naked pubes are one of those weird notions society foists on women under the guise of beauty. The custom no doubt stems from some ancient queen who, through a freak of nature, came out of puberty as hairless as a doorknob, so she dictated that henceforth all proper women could have no body hair. Or maybe it’s a throwback to the Middle Ages when crab lice infested rich and poor alike, baths were a yearly chore, and soap was made of lye and lard. No doubt it was more effective to clear-cut the forest than to try to root out the pests individually.

  Okay, rest assured I didn’t obsess over pubic hair. The topic rarely came up. But it did have deep roots. Seventh grade. We were learning handstands and cartwheels in PE. I couldn’t do either. The teacher kept at me. She called over another girl to help and made me try again. When I threw my legs up, they each grabbed one to hold me steady. My legs splayed out in airborne splits, and horror of horrors, a bushy fringe crept from my regulation white gym shorts. That same girl sidled up later and said, “You sure have a lot of hair down there.” I was mortified. I had the only untamed forest in seventh grade.

  In sum, in this arena, au naturel is by far a damsel’s dearest friend, despite the fact that our society defines such natural growth as the hairy monster from the dark lagoon.

  “Dang,” I said to the image in the mirror, “if you’re going to wear this getup in public, you’d better get out the sheep shears.” The discussion in the next dressing room halted. Someone giggled. A different voice called, “Mademoiselle? You are finish, oui?”

  Uh-oh. Must be a line out there. So what to do? This is your grand adventure, Ann. You’re in Europe. No one knows you. Go for it!

  After a hasty exit from the dressing room, I bought a bikini that afternoon, a real one, skimpy enough to make me blush. But black, a please-don’t-notice-me black. I couldn’t loosen up for one of those bright scraps of stretchy cloth and string shouting “Feast on these goodies” that the European beauties pranced around in.