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

by Terry Marshall

  Acknowledgments

  With gratitude to Mary Lou, Heidi, Marian, Allen, Fran, Susan, Gary, Bonner, Jim, Pam, Greg, Randall, Kathy, Michael, Jon, Earl, Lois, and Charles, who all played important roles in our story.

  To our folks—Ralph and Dorothy Garretson, and Charles and Margaret Marshall—and Ann’s grandmother, Alice Courts, who raised us in love and patience, even after we chose paths they would have preferred we had never discovered.

  To Laura Lee Christiansen, who changed Terry’s life in 1963; she remains a dear friend to both of us, and gave us valuable feedback on key sections of our manuscript.

  To our high school teachers, Julia Speiser and David Judy; and to our university professors, A. Gayle Waldrop, John Mitchell, Bob Rhode, Floyd Baskette, and William Markward, our initial tutors in writing and literature.

  To Greg Blake Miller and Hope Edelman, excellent writers, superb mentors, skilled coaches, astute literary critics, and patient advisers. In their critiques of several versions of our complete manuscript, both of them, in different ways, helped us better structure our story, sharpen our prose, and turn our experiences into a coherent memoir.

  To Tim Bascom, B. K. Loren, Marc Nieson, Nancy McGlasson, Alan Brody, Magda Montiel Davis, Amy Turner, Dag Scheer, Sarah Conover, Ann Green, Sue Ade, Tim Hillegonds, and Diana Hovey for their thoughtful comments, critiques, and suggestions at various stages of our manuscript.

  To Cynthia Carbajal for her creative initial book cover and travel maps, which gave visual life to our words.

  To Jared and Julia Drake, who helped us present our work to a world beyond our own backyard, and who linked us to Sandra Jonas.

  To our publisher Sandra Jonas, who believed in our project, who asked the tough questions to help us refine our story and characters, who served as our editor extraordinaire, and who did the hard work to bring the book to fruition and to the reading public.

  To Jill Tappert, who read our manuscript with a sharp eye tuned to the smallest errors, historical inconsistencies, word repetitions, and passages in need of massaging for clarity.

  To Jack’s parents, Bud and Peggy Sigg, who embraced Ann as a family member and shared the best fresh corn to be found; and to Jack’s cousins, Gregory Sigg Murphy (who shared numerous family photos with us), Pam Sigg, Lin (Sigg) Morgan, Jack Quinn, and Jean Quinn.

  To Jack’s and Bonner’s West Point and other military comrades, especially Colonel Tom Fintel and French Lieutenant Jacques d’Achon, who provided us with photos, insights, encouragement, and background information on various events in Jack’s professional years. Lieutenant d’Achon also shared a trove of his own photos from the German-Czech border.

  To the UNLV Special Collections Library for their assistance in setting Ann up with the equipment to listen to and digitize Jack’s many reel-toreel taped letters to Ann.

  And finally, to the digital geniuses who designed and shared Google Search, Wikipedia, and Facebook, which enabled us to connect with key people in the United States and France who informed our knowledge of the Cold War in Europe. These tools also made it possible for us to find details such as key rail and auto routes through Europe, phases of the moon, times of specific sunrises and sunsets, hamburger prices, and scores of obscure facts and figures that added color to our story.

  A Note on Memory and Sources

  We have done our best to tell our story with authenticity. To aid our memory and to reconstruct conversations and thoughts, we combed our extensive collection of personal letters, notes, news clippings, and audiotapes. We don’t claim to remember the exact words of every conversation, but the dialogue and narrative represent our interactions as faithfully as we can—even when they are painful or reflect poorly on us.

  Now, fifty-plus years later, we still ache as people and events rise from the spent wick of our youth in an eerie séance with our current selves and passions. All of us have behaved imperfectly at some critical junctures, a fact that in no way diminishes our love for our families and friends, then or now. We have long since forgiven past injuries, theirs and ours. We hope our readers, and our adult children, will do likewise.

  All the people herein are real, not composites or constructs. We have, however, used pseudonyms for key people to protect their privacy: Sarah Abrams, Rachael Goldman, Laura Lee Christensen, Geoff Jordan, Gretchen Schumacher, Stefanie Wiercinski, Angelica Archuleta, Bobby Marks, Cindy Gomez, Dr. Wagner, Dr. Perini, and everyone identified only by a first name. Further, for simplicity, we have used the family name “Bonner” for Ann’s older brother, Ralph Bonner Garretson Jr. His friends and colleagues knew him as Ralph. Finally, Smoky Point, Colorado, and Huntersville, Nebraska, are pseudonyms for real towns.

  Some of the people have since died, including our parents, Bonner, Allen Nossaman, and Sarah Abrams; we miss them. Others have remained dear friends throughout our lives, including Gary Althen and the people presented as Laura Lee, Angelica, and Ann’s “high school boyfriend.” Ann also corresponded, visited, and exchanged occasional gifts with Bud Sigg, Jack’s father, until he died in 2005. And over time, we have made serendipitous connections with six of Jack’s cousins, including Jack Quinn, who contacted Ann within hours after hearing her 2018 Memorial Day tribute to Jack Sigg in an interview with NPR’s Ari Shapiro. Jack Quinn has since died.

  We lost touch with Gretchen, and despite efforts by an archivist in Landshut and a private detective in the US, we have been unable to locate her. Ann kept her secrecy promise to Jack for forty years before she shared it with family members, some of whom want to meet their previously unrecognized relative, Gretchen and Bonner’s daughter. If Gretchen should ever read this account, she will recognize her story despite the pseudonym, and we want her to know that we would welcome a reunion with her.

  A Rendezvous to Remember is more than the adventures of three people and assorted friends and family. We also wanted to show how the chaotic early 1960s, awash in women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, affected our lives and the lives of our generation.

  To reconstruct this era, we did extensive research and interviews with others who lived through those heady times. Ann sought out Jack’s and Bonner’s West Point classmates and fellow officers to learn more about life on the German-Czech border in 1963–64 and interviewed two men who served there with them: an American, Colonel Tom Fintel, and a Frenchman, former Lieutenant Jacques D’Achon. Mr. D’Achon, who has since died, gave us several dozen photos taken on the border, and Ann still corresponds with his daughter, Cecile. Colonel Fintel, now retired, related actions on the border the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

  Although Jack and Bonner were two of the main actors in Colonel Fintel’s story, Ann hadn’t heard it from either of them. The story stuck with her, and we concluded that we needed to tell it to convey a little-publicized potential “near-miss” on that fateful day in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. So, with deep gratitude to Colonel Fintel, Ann reimagined Jack telling the story to Colonel Ed Kirtley, officer to officer. Colonel Kirtley was serving in Verona, Italy, when Jack and Ann visited him and Edna Mae there in July 1964.

  On a final note, what became of Terry and the draft?

  We assume Terry had some kind of deferment while we were in the Philippines—though they never told him. At the time, Peace Corps volunteers didn’t receive an automatic deferment.

  After the Peace Corps, the board reclassified him I-A (available for military service), setting off another long series of attempts to get him reclassified as a CO, including the hiring of another lawyer when Terry was a grad student in Wisconsin. He appealed. The board turned him down.

  Terry met personally with the board in mid-August of that year. After they denied his appeal, he appealed the local board’s decision to a five-person state appeal board. That board also denied it, and classified him I-A again in November 1967.

  The battle continued.

  The board wrote Terry a letter in July 1968 reaffirm
ing his I-A classification, but they said that the draft wasn’t currently taking men over twenty-six, so they were going to stop working on his appeal. The following spring, they classified him II-S (student deferment) and in December of 1969 reclassified him II-A (occupational deferment other than agricultural and student).

  There the correspondence ends. We believe they simply buried Terry’s case in the back of a filing cabinet and left it.

  Photo Album

  The Garretsons (clockwise from left): Ralph Sr., Dorothy, Bonner (Ralph Jr.), Ann, and Jimmy, 1956.

  Ann, cheerleader, Livorno American High School, Camp Darby, Italy, 1957.

  The Marshalls (from left): Terry, Randy (now goes by Randall), Margaret, Greg, Charles, and Pam, 1958.

  Colorado’s winners of the Ford Teen-age Press Conference: Terry in 1958 and Ann in 1959.

  Terry, 1958.

  Ann’s passport (to Germany) photo, 1964.

  A man and his “horses”: Jack Sigg, his Corvette Sting Ray, and his tank, Landshut, Germany, 1964.

  Jack Sigg, West Point cadet, 1961.

  Captain Jack Sigg, Vietnam, 1965.

  Silverton, Colorado, as seen from Molas Pass, 2015.

  Surviving Black Bear Pass. This isn’t Allen Nossaman’s 1958 Scout, but it is the route we traversed in chapter 8.

  A mountain wedding: Terry and Ann, married at last, 1965.

  Jack’s birthday vase to Ann—designed, crafted, and delivered to her dorm in Boulder, Colorado, from Bavaria, Germany, 1964.

  About the Authors

  Terry Marshall grew up on a farm in Center, Colorado. Ann Garretson Marshall was an army brat who spent her childhood on military bases in the United States and Italy.

  After they graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder—Ann with a degree in English and Terry in journalism—Ann taught high school English in Glendale, Arizona, while Terry worked as a reporter and then as the editor of the Glendale News-Herald. Following their marriage, they both taught English in the Philippines as Peace Corps volunteers.

  Terry earned an MS in rural sociology from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD from Cornell University in sociology of development. He has worked as a community organizer and activist, including three years as a Peace Corps country co-director in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu; two years in the Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, DC; and six years organizing on behalf of Chicanos in his hometown. Terry has studied, analyzed, and written both fiction and nonfiction works on discrimination, poverty, rural development, foreign language learning, and intercultural relations.

  Ann earned an MS in communication arts from Cornell University. She worked side by side with Terry as a Peace Corps country co-director in the Pacific and as a community organizer and activist in Colorado. She has thirty years’ experience as a writer, editor, and organizer helping the US government involve local communities in the cleanup of hazardous contamination and nuclear waste. Ann is also a trained mediator.

  The couple live in Las Vegas, Nevada. They have two adult children.

  Visit their website: TerryAnnMarshall.com.