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

by Terry Marshall

  “Me too.” He offered his hand. “Okay. We’re in Venice—almost the end of our trip. Let’s make the most of it!”

  Good ole Jack. Back to his enthusiastic self. I accepted his olive branch, and we bounded across the bridge. Together. A couple again.

  It seemed that every corner deli had a master chef in training. We loaded up on pastries bursting with meat, cheese, and crisp veggies, plus two blood oranges, and searched the byways of the Giardini Papadopoli for a picnic spot. Settling into a stand of trees, we devoured our goodies, all the while scouring Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day for every single “you can’t miss this sight” in Venice. Monday night we’d be back in Landshut, in the land of army demands. If not on the border, Jack would be at his desk under the colonel’s thumb.

  From the array of Frommer options, I latched onto Murano Island. “What say we find out how they make Murano glass? It’s a far cry from ‘our’ Bavarian crystal, but it’s so intricate, so colorful, so tiny! The factories offer free exhibitions. And the hourly ferry is forty-five lire round trip. That’s only seven cents.”

  “Great! You know how I love demos. And bargains.”

  We scrambled for the next ferry and spent the waning hours of the afternoon in the spell of master glassblowers creating these spidery gems. We trooped from factory to factory until hunger and weariness drove us back to Venice. On the boat, Jack asked, “So what do you like better: Bavarian crystal or Murano glass?”

  “They’re both amazing. But my Bavarian vase is the gift of a lifetime, no matter what.” That brought a sunny smile.

  At Piazza San Marco, we settled on the retaining wall and laughed at each other eating the uncontrollable cheese strings from our fried mozzarella sandwiches. A band struck up, and we enjoyed a ringside seat for a free evening concert. Well, some of us, anyway. I fell asleep, Jack’s arm enfolded around me. At some point, he woke me enough to guide me back to the hotel, where I tumbled into bed without brushing my teeth.

  Sunday, July 12, Venice. Reading from Frommer’s over breakfast, I said, “Hey, listen to this. ‘Most Venetian museums are free on Sundays.’ Shall we tour the Doge’s Palace and the Torre dell’Orologio?”

  “Yes!”

  “Soak up Venetian art at the Gallerie dell’Accademia?”

  “Of course. Let’s visit them all!”

  Hours later, my feet were dragging, and I couldn’t keep up. “Ready for a rest?” Jack asked. We stopped long enough to eat two gelatos and then took off again, winding our way through a dozen tiny art galleries. Further on, shops selling miniature watercolors captured every nuance of this fabled city. I halted at one. “Hey, there’s our bridge: Dead Fish Crossing.”

  Jack squinted at the painting, then sniffed it. “Nope, can’t be. Smells more like the fresh laundry flying above the canal than our fishy friend.”

  At the Grand Canal, a sprawling watery boulevard, we caught a vaporetto, one of those chugging water-buses. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re going to float along, rest our feet, and imagine life in one of these grand old homes on the canal.”

  I smiled, and in my head, I painted a picture of Jack and me and a flock of little Siggs at our ankles exploring the byways of this charming city. That thought kept me warm despite the cool breeze blowing off the canal.

  Eventually, we wound up at the Lido, a slender barrier island between Venice and the Adriatic Sea, where we meandered at water’s edge. Looking at the ships in the distance, I said, “What must it have been like, sailing the seas with Marco Polo?”

  “It must have been awful. Think about traveling in one of those creaky old sailing ships and trekking overland on what, a camel?”

  “Difficult yes, but imagine the adventure of traveling to new lands, meeting new people. It would be like our grand tour, multiplied by a hundred.”

  We ate on the beach, watching the dipping sun paint the clouds gold and black over Venice. As we cuddled on a dawdling vaporetto en route back to Piazza San Marco, dots of light twinkled on, grew brighter, and cast long reflections in the canal. Around us, tenor gondoliers materialized from the dark, serenading the lantern-lit lovers in their holds. The melodies, I told Jack, seemed more romantic wafting across the water at night.

  On the ride back, as our days together paraded through my mind, I told him this truth: “If I live to a hundred, this summer will be etched forever in my heart—extraordinary places all, now uniquely our own.”

  The two small lamps with old-fashioned lampshades cast our room in a cozy hue. Jack wrapped his arms around me and whispered, “You know, Venice is the most romantic city of cities. Tell me that tonight’s the night.”

  I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t. “Let’s play it by ear. Better yet, by touch. For starters, I’m going to give you an old-fashioned, time-tested cowpoke massage. On yer belly, soldier!”

  “Yes, ma’am!” He dived angle wise across the bed.

  On our last night, I wanted him to totally unwind before he plunged back into the Cold War. Hunkered on my knees at the foot of the bed, I pulled each calf into a hug, massaged his ankles, squeezed and tugged each toe, pressing into his soles to relieve the aches from walking all day. Pinch-walking the muscles on the backs of his legs, I continued up to his shorts and skated underneath to his fuzzy buns. His small grunts of satisfaction emboldened me, and I straddled his fanny to get a better angle on his back. His buns tightened beneath me, and from deep inside a delicious glow spread through my thighs and tummy.

  “I like where you’re headed,” he whispered.

  “Hang on. More to come.”

  I tugged off his T-shirt, tossed it aside, and worked my hands into the cranky muscles in his back, slipping his undershorts down a bit for a deep massage on his tailbone. Hugging his sides with my knees, I told him, “That’s how a cowgirl hangs on to a stallion.”

  “Don’t worry. This old horse is tethered to the spot.”

  When I stretched to reach his arms, my hair tumbled over his head, and I snuggled into his neck. Slowly, he turned over, and little by little, we lost sight of the massage and concentrated on each other. For the finale of this long, slow crescendo, he slipped off my nightie and panties and dropped them beside the bed, and I removed his undershorts.

  He tapped at the gate, gently but persistently. My body burned with desire. I wanted him, but I tightened up. I couldn’t, even in that most romantic city.

  Instead, I grasped his eager second lieutenant—in affirmation, not denial. “Relax. This moment’s for you,” I said, though I fully accepted the hand slowly inching up my inner thigh.

  Our eyes homed in on each other. I stroked him and squeezed him. He stiffened, rose up into my hand, wouldn’t hold still. Suddenly, he threw his arms over his head and shuddered. I took my own pleasure in it too—how wondrous that a few loving strokes could both inflame his zealous instrument and tame it into a spent shadow of itself.

  Afterward, we lay pretzeled together, his leg looped lazily over mine, my arms wound through his. “You okay?” I asked.

  “More than okay. Ecstatic.”

  “Still doubt me?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Any more questions, sir?”

  “How about an encore?”

  Terry

  Sunday, 12 July 1964, San Francisco. After breakfast, we were sitting around talking and watching the news when CBS Channel 5 announced a protest march against a predicted hands-down win for Senator Barry Goldwater at the Republican National Convention. It was set to open Monday at the Cow Palace, San Francisco’s convention center.

  Paula and I glanced at each other. We couldn’t resist.

  Mom shook her head. “You kids are nuts.”

  I don’t know how Paula convinced her mom and dad to let her skip church and come with me. But my cousin could have charmed Goldwater himself into voting for President Johnson.

  An hour later, she and I plunged into a crowd of black people and fell
in behind a guy with a four-year-old on his shoulders and a pregnant wife at his side. We weren’t the only whites—there were scores—but whites were clearly a minority. The parade wasn’t floats and bands marching in step. Rather, a slow-motion stream of folks flowed up Market Street, as if en route to church, most of the men in suits, ties, and hats, others in dress shirts and sweaters, and women in Sunday dresses. No hippies, scruffy longhairs, or disheveled malcontents. And no jeering segregationists showering us with insults.

  I’d seen protests only on TV—in Birmingham, Jackson, and Detroit—and in photos of the 1963 March on Washington. Being inside a protest was a new world for me. There were no blacks in Center—not one. In high school, no team in our league had black athletes. None. At CU, we only occasionally saw a black person on campus. A handful starred on the football and track teams, but the basketball squad had only one. We had one black guy in my freshman- and sophomore-year dorms, but I’d never spoken with him.

  That first step onto Market Street was tough. I was nervous. No, not nervous—scared, my heart racing. I glanced furtively at the faces around us. No one frowned or snarled or called me a honky or flipped the bird. Beside me, Paula stepped out as confidently as if joining a group of classmates. This was a meandering crowd of like-minded protesters, nothing to fear.

  Paula and I strode along, waving her calligraphy signs like beacons. Hers read “Civil Rights in ’64 / Ho, Ho, Ho, Barry Must Go.” Mine was less flamboyant: “Civil Rights, Yes / Goldwater, No.” I took Paula’s hand and squeezed it. She beamed and squeezed back. “Me too, cuz. This is great, isn’t it?”

  I wasn’t one who worshipped heroes, but JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. came close. I had read King’s Stride Toward Freedom enough times that I knew every detail of the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott. I had followed news of the Birmingham protests in the spring and summer of 1963 and toyed with going to the March on Washington in August. When the four little girls—Denise McNair, Carole Robinson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley—were murdered in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that fall, the news hit me like they were the children of family friends.

  But I had done nothing to further the movement—no marching, no protesting, no sign waving, no contributions, nothing. For me, in Center and at CU, civil rights had been a national news story, not something that involved me personally.

  What had drawn me to King was his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Stride Toward Freedom. In it, he calls for a “philosophy of nonviolence,” defining nonviolence as a force for peace, not a cop-out for the cowardly. As a force, it seeks to win an opponent’s friendship and understanding, not to defeat or humiliate him. King urges us to attack the force of evil, not the persons doing the evil, to accept suffering without retaliation, and to avoid both physical violence and violence of spirit.

  “The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent,” King writes, “but he also refuses to hate him.” Christianity should tackle both social injustices and man’s spiritual enlightenment, he asserts. He weaves in Niebuhr’s critique of pacifism, Gandhi’s belief that pacifism confronts evil by the power of love, and the ancient Greek distinctions for different kinds of love—eros, philia, and agape, “love seeking to preserve and create community.”

  To me, King’s philosophy applied to both military service and civil rights. He articulated my own turmoil as I wrestled with my belief that the draft, military service, and war itself were immoral. His essay formed the intellectual underpinning for my case that the draft board should classify me as a conscientious objector on moral grounds, not religious ones.

  King made me a believer in nonviolence and heightened my awareness of civil rights. Though I knew little about prejudice against blacks, the cause felt right, largely because my rural hometown of Center had a history of discrimination. Not against blacks, but against Mexican Americans, who made up sixty percent of the population. They were segregated into a sixteen-block barrio fronting the railroad tracks. Anglos ran the town, owned the businesses, and held every seat on town council and school board. In the barrio, poverty was the norm.

  As a high school student who lived on a farm, I knew nothing about the conditions in the barrio. That changed my junior year when I dated Angela Archuleta, the daughter of a farm worker. In Center, Anglos didn’t date “Mexicans.” But I thought I was immune to that taboo—after all, I had been class president every year since eighth grade, and Angela was a top student, a cheerleader, and the prettiest girl in school.

  On our first date, we strode into the all-Anglo Masonic Hall for the year’s premier social event, the Valentine’s Day DeMolay Sweetheart Ball. No Mexican American—girl or guy—had ever been invited to the Sweetheart Ball. Classmates gasped. Chaperones sputtered. Angela and I danced the night away. Afterward, parked on a lonely dirt road three miles out of town, we enjoyed our first kisses. By the next morning, town gossips were peppering the telephone party lines with rumors and slurs.

  That gutsy girl opened a window into a world I had been blind to.

  Now, on this bright July morning in San Francisco, we marched into Civic Center Plaza, no longer a loose menagerie, but a pulsating mass gulping for air, Paula and I in a sea of heads and shoulders. Half a football field away, a tiny figure popped up on a temporary stage. A disembodied voice rattled over the loudspeaker, “William Scranton, governor of Pennsylvania!” stretching it out as if he were a prizefighter entering the ring.

  Scranton laid into Barry Goldwater—clearly a fugitive from Dante’s eighth circle. We cheered, we clapped, we waved our signs. But the Gold-water juggernaut had locked up the nomination before the opening gavel.

  A string of celebrities paraded to the lectern—Jackie Robinson, James Farmer, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits—and each boomed his support for freedom, equality, and opportunity. Again, we cheered, we clapped, we waved our signs. Two phrases later, we did it again.

  And then Nelson Rockefeller came to the mike and blasted Goldwater. We cheered. But he launched an attack on Democrats. We booed. He went on and on. The sun got hotter and hotter. A sickly cloud of perfume and aftershave and cigarette smoke and BO settled over us. My eyes burned. Rockefeller finished. We cheered, thankful that he was done. My feet hurt. People mopped sweat from their faces. We needed towels.

  Finally it was over—two hours of political fire and brimstone. The beehive we were in expanded, giving me room to wriggle my elbows and talk to Paula.

  “I’ve got to pee,” she said.

  “Me too.” We worked our way toward a bank of portable toilets. In the milling crowd, two women were dissecting Rockefeller’s diatribe phrase by phrase, laying it out like English teachers diagramming a page-long sentence. Ahead, someone told a joke, and his circle burst into laughter. A toddler wobbled past. His mother shot by and caught him by his waistband. He screeched in joy, and she scooped him up, hugging him as if he were a teddy bear. We were a family of thousands, assembled to oppose an anti–civil rights, whites-only Republican Party that wanted to drag us back to the “good old days.”

  Paula overheard two black guys talking about a protest march. “They’re with CORE,” she said. “They’re gonna picket the Cow Palace. Right now.” Her eyes grew big. “Why not? It’s boring at home, and we do have these signs.”

  Indeed, why not? “It would be a crime to waste your art,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We were seventy strong—I counted—shuffling in an amorphous loop outside the main entrance to the Cow Palace. We waved our signs and bounced them up and down. Across from Paula and me, the chairman belted out “Jim Crow Must Go.”

  I had no idea who the chairman was or how he got that position, but he was the loudest, no question, so we shouted our response, each word sharp, clear, and as loud as we could make it: “Jim. Crow. Must. Go.” Again. Over and over.

  Aside from Paula, I didn’t know any of these people. But as we marched and shouted and waved our signs, the faces became familiar. “Freckle-face” hande
d me a bottle of water. I took a drink and passed it on. “Stretch” popped a joke and we all laughed. “Princess” said she was hungry. “Little John” hollered, “I’ll order a pizza.” We applauded. We were friends, even if we didn’t know each other’s names. We shared a cause. We were working together as one.

  Not long into the afternoon, a band of hecklers sidled up to within spitting range—twenty college kids, all scrubbed preppies. They, too, had signs, printed professionally, not homemade—“Barry in ’64 / Goldwater for the US of A;” “Young Republicans / Adore Goldwater;” “True Americans / Vote Goldwater.” Plus bright campaign buttons and festive hats, the whole works. They chanted, “Go Barry, Go! Go Barry, Go! Go Barry, Go!”

  Our group had thirty-one blacks, thirty-nine whites. A handful were older men and housewives, and two or three looked like high school kids. We were integrated. The Goldwater kids were all whites, every one of them.

  The chairman boomed, “Who should go?”

  “Goldwater!” we shouted.

  “Who?”

  “Goldwater!”

  “Louder,” he hollered, like a high school cheerleader.

  “GOLDWATER!”

  “Go where?”

  “Back to Arizona!”

  “Louder.”

  “ARIZONA!”

  We drowned out the preppies, but they were like horseflies, intent on annoying us. A couple of them, no doubt both first-string tackles at USC, bellowed: “Take a bath, hippies!” “Try work, not welfare!” “Go to college, creeps—make something of yourselves!”

  We sang. We marched. We alternated between football chants and civil rights songs, as spirited as if we had come from a Southern Baptist revival:

  Oh freedom! Oh freedom!

  Oh freedom over me

  And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave

  And go home to my Lord and be free.

  The song went on and on, some verses expressing a painful recollection of what it had meant to be a slave and now to be treated as a second-class citizen, and others expressing hope for the future. It wasn’t just a song but a powerful hymn to lives I had known nothing of: