by John Bloom
In public—public being the 414 permanent residents of Norwich—Betty wore her popularity lightly. There were flashier girls, more talented girls, girls who came from more powerful Kansas families. But it was Betty’s very conventionality that made her the frequent center of attention. She was the kind of girl who was always being elected vice-president. She played clarinet in the band and guard on the girls basketball team and was competent, if undistinguished, at both. (She quit both, too, after deciding that the Y-Teens and Methodist Youth Fellowship were where her true talents lay.) She tried her best to be feminine, making the most of her infrequent shopping trips to Wichita for dresses, blouses, and shoes. But she could also drive a tractor, and never rebelled against the more tedious family chores—baling hay, dressing roosters, pumping gas at her father’s Standard station—that some kids would have resisted. The grey, listless land of Kingman County is not an invigorating kind of environment—the prairie is hard and dry, and there is no such thing as a wealthy farmer—but Betty had the gay, unquestioning optimism of a girl in love with a place for no more reason than that it is her place.
Bob Pomeroy, Betty’s father, was a Kansan to the marrow, a huge, bearish farmer whose 260 pounds were so well distributed over his six-foot-three-inch frame that he seemed less overweight than simply monumental. He was a man of few words beyond what he needed to transact business, and few allegiances beyond his family and closest friends; but he had that instinctive Kansas sense of community that made him one of the first to show up at the scene of a burning barn or at a grieving widow’s hearthside. Bob was noncommital about formal religion; he was raised a Baptist, switched to Methodism because the kids liked it better, supported the church but left the actual worship to the rest of the family. But he was also the sort of man who never doubted for an instant the existence of the Almighty. He had never held formal office, but he was a pillar nonetheless, not only because of the Pomeroy name (tied to the Kansas land for four generations) but because Bob’s granitic perseverance, even in the years when the wind and the freezing rain dashed the crops into fodder, was an assurance that some things never changed. When Bob would walk down the main street of Norwich, his full head of black and silver hair combed back over his large oval face, his shoulders broad as a double-span harness, small children would look up from their play and note his passing with a quiet, tentative “Hello, Mr. Pomeroy,” a repeated greeting that would gain in intensity and volume as a smile creased Bob’s face.
Bob met his wife in 1948 on one of his rare vacations, a visit to the famous mineral baths in Claremore, Oklahoma, where he hoped to relieve his congenital arthritis. The daughter of a farming family, sixteen-year-old Bertha Hancock was a small, modest girl, with dark hair and delicate facial features, though much more talkative than Bob. The courtship lasted two weeks. A month after that they were installed in a drafty three-room cracker-box on 160 acres outside Norwich, where Betty would spend the first sixteen years of her life, helping Bertha cook on a wood stove and using an outdoor bathroom. She was the first child and the only girl, four years older than brother Ronnie and eight years senior to baby Richard.
On January 1, 1963, a few days shy of her thirteenth birthday, Betty began keeping a diary, using a No. 2 wooden pencil and a large, upright script that would yaw and weave as she tried to control its journey across the thin blue lines of the pages, which were not much bigger than playing cards. The diary had a pale blue binding of simulated leather, with a thong of reinforced cardboard that fit into a gold clasp and allowed her to lock up her secrets each night with the tiniest of keys. When she began, she was (like her handwriting) still awkward and gangly. She struggled against the twin social evils of being too tall and having thick, unruly hair that, regardless of what she did, wouldn’t take to that Toni curl. But those anxieties soon subsided as she discovered that flipped hair wasn’t a girl’s only asset. On February 14 of her seventh-grade year, she was able to write, “I got 19 valentines. One from Leon B. which said he liked me but if I didn’t like him to tell him.”
For the next six years—until the day in 1968 when Bob loaded her belongings into the back of the family pickup and moved her into a freshman dorm at Southwestern, the cross-state college at Winfield—she wrote something in that diary every day. Sometimes it was just a line about church or athletic events or test scores, but increasingly its content turned away from mail-order pictures of Troy Donahue and Vince Edwards, or Elvis movies, or books with titles like Double Date, Three Loves Has Sandy, or A Spring to Remember, to the real thing: boys. Not Leon B., though. Leon made one more appearance in the diary (“Tonight Leon B. called and said he wanted my picture”) and then faded into oblivion. Betty had become too popular for shy boys who declare their love in valentines.
In later years her friends would recall Betty as the girl who always had a boyfriend—or two, or three—but who never really seemed to be in love. She was too serious and sensible for that. Not that she didn’t like the idea of being attractive; she was quick to notice even the slightest sign of affection, as though she were constantly surprised by her own power over boys. “Tonight a boy stopped to fix his tire,” she wrote. “When he left he waved, smiled and said bye to me. He was very cute.” And she was always thrilled when Ronnie, her little brother, would report some second-hand compliment from a distant admirer. But on the whole she kept her emotions in check, and thought of the fawning boys as frivolous escorts she could pass the time with while waiting on a real man. No doubt Betty’s cool remoteness, not unfriendly but never really uninhibited either, only served to enhance her attractiveness. She was the archetypal nice girl, wholesome, uncomplaining, responsive, intelligent. She was the kind of girl every mother wanted her son to marry.
And, for the most part, Betty could have had her pick of the lot. By the spring of her eighth-grade year, she could write, without a trace of affectation, “I’m about the most popular girl now. The boys are teasing me about Max and James. Harvey winked all day. He’s so nice. Jon did too.” And the following day: “Harvey wrote me a note. He said he wanted a picture of me and I was beautiful. I was invited to a Hobo Hike.” But Harvey was no more lucky than Leon B., for a month later he was out of the picture as well.
Accompanied by her shifting armada of boyfriends, Betty did all the things that teenaged girls in rural Kansas were expected to do. She competed in track meets, joined the scouts, got a part in the school play, went to slumber parties, sent off for an “Art Talent Test,” went with the band to the music festival in Pratt, roller-skated, watched the Beatles the first time they were on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” went swimming at the lake in Cheney, spent long nights decorating the gym for theme dances like “Apple Blossom Time” and “Hawaiian Luau,” discovered hair bonnets and cinnamon toothpicks, went to the Hootenanny in Spivey and the rodeo at Altisa and the Pizza Hut in Wichita, used words like “fab” and phrases like “having a blast,” and helped plan Twerp Week and Clash Day and Junior Fun Nite. But mostly she went to the movies.
Movies were like a promise to Betty of the world she would enter when she got out of Norwich. It was not that she disliked Norwich, or that she was the slightest bit rebellious; it was just something that she and everybody else always assumed. Betty was the smart one, the one who would leave, the one who would go to college and come back with a degree and a husband who would take her to somewhere that was not Norwich. Perhaps he would look like Troy Donahue in Palm Springs Weekend, or John Gavin in Back Street, or Rock Hudson in The Spiral Road, or, as the sixties wore on, the indistinguishable actors who flashed their teeth and physiques in films like Sex and the Single Girl, The Pleasure Seekers, or Peyton Place. In Norwich, the weekly movie was one of the summer events around which the adolescent social calendar revolved. The films were shown outdoors, free of charge, as the young daters reclined on grassy hillsides and spread their blankets beneath the trees. (A drive to nearby Kingman, or all the way to Wichita, was required during the rest of the year. Betty made the trip at least o
nce a week.)
Except for movies, the principal occupation of Norwich’s teenagers was Riding Around. In the absence of anywhere to go, they made a virtue of necessity by using their cars as ends in themselves, places that were not home and not school but a sanctuary of the young, even if they were just spinning up and down the farm-to-market roads or creeping along the main street of town. An invitation to Ride Around had, in fact, the moral seriousness of any other date, as Betty learned the hard way: “Tonight Mike was gonna come down but before he got here Jon & Wayne came & asked me to ride around. I did & I was sure sorry. Mike’s pretty mad.” After particularly important Riding Around nights, Betty would come home and write exuberant messages to herself in the diary, punctuated by mysterious letter codes—“C.C.C.C.” or “R.R.R.R.R.R.”—whose meaning bore an unmistakable relationship to the private rituals honored from time immemorial by young men and women alone at night on dark country lanes.
Norwich was not a cosmopolitan place. Its residents came mostly from the same Anglo-German stock: Protestant, conservative yeomen. For all practical purposes, Betty’s perceived world ended thirty miles away at Wichita, and even the family’s annual one-week vacation took her to places similar to Kansas—once to a fishing resort in Arkansas, another time to visit relatives in rural Illinois, once to Colorado and Utah. The social upheavals of the age seemed distant indeed. Race riots? There were no Negroes in Norwich and never had been. Crime? People still left their doors unlocked. War protests? Most of Betty’s classmates were too young to be drafted during the peak years of the Vietnam involvement anyway. In 1963 she would write in her diary, “Today Pres. Kennedy was shot and killed. Tonight was the carnival. Gary ran the B.B. stand. I shot 2 times and got 2 out of 10. He’s such a doll.” And in 1968, when Betty was eighteen: “Today was okay. Martin Luther King was assinated (sic) last nite. There are race riots all over. Jimmy came in tonight & we rode around. I Love Him!!”
By the time she made the latter entry, her preoccupation with Jimmy could have survived World War III. Jimmy Sheetz was what is known in Norwich as “fast,” meaning he was a little older (one year ahead of Betty) and a little more sure of himself than the rest, not to mention a lot more handsome. Jimmy won her heart the summer between her junior and senior years when, on one of those lazy nights when three boys were hanging around the Pomeroy house, he surprised her in the kitchen and stole a kiss. The boldness was what got her. Despite her popularity, Betty was never wholly convinced that she wasn’t plain, so she tended to cling hard to anything as handsome as Jimmy Sheetz. And he turned out to be her one lasting boyfriend. They were inseparable for her entire senior year, he commuting to a job in Wichita, with Betty’s college plans the only thing separating them from marriage. Betty had a single-minded determination to be a school teacher and had talked of getting her certificate as long as she had talked about college. At one point she and Jimmy discussed the logistics of her going to college while Jimmy stayed home, and they even set a wedding date, albeit four years away. But then Betty suddenly broke it off. The immediate cause was the school’s senior trip, which occurred the week after graduation every year, and which in 1968 took Betty to a resort at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. In three days, duly recorded in her diary, her whole future outlook changed:
Thursday, May 30: Today I met Glenn Welborne from Dallas City, Ill. He’s really neat. We danced till we couldn’t any longer. We went to an amusement park tonight.
Friday, May 31: Today we went to Ozark Caverns. They weren’t very good. We went to a melodrama tonight. Glenn even walked me to the cabin after the dance & gave me a goodnight kiss.
Saturday, June 1: The Dallas City kids left today. Darn! Glenn promised to write. Hope he does. Nothing went on tonight.
A week later, back in Norwich, she told Jimmy she felt “tied down.” After ten months of courtship, she gave him his ring back. Glenn Welborne never wrote.
Her trip to the Ozarks, at the age of eighteen, was Betty’s first extended stay away from Kansas and apart from her family. And whatever she saw there remained with her. Glenn from Dallas City may not have been the man of her dreams, but he was a foretaste of something beyond Norwich. She wanted to find out what else was out there, and so all of her attention focused on the fall of 1968, when she would enter Southwestern College at Winfield, Kansas, on an $800 scholarship. Within a week after breaking up with Jimmy, she was being courted by five other boys, but the summer still bored her. She couldn’t wait to be gone.
In later years Bob and Bertha Pomeroy would look back on 1968 as one of the happiest years in Betty’s life, a time when she breathed exuberance and gaiety and when she seemed at the center of a benevolent, approving universe. Whenever he could, Bob took snapshots of Betty that year—with Jimmy, dressed up for a dance; in her cap and gown; in her band uniform—but one photograph stands out from the others. It was taken on the night of the homecoming game. Betty had been elected to the queen’s court, of course, and a metal platform had been erected on the field for the coronation. It held a large backdrop, decorated with a silver aluminum-foil half-moon, two or three dozen silver stars, and a curved banner that fluttered across the half-moon and pronounced in glittering script, “Some Enchanted Evening.” Standing on the front of the platform are four young women. Betty is the only one with glasses, and her handsome burnt-orange dress is the simplest, least distinctive of the four. But the eye is drawn instantly to her, for reasons that have something to do with her height but more to do with a certain radiance to her expression. Her smile is wide and natural and fresh, and her eyes are looking out into the crowd, over the heads of the people who must have been standing just in front of her, or perhaps they are looking past the crowd altogether.
The one thing Betty Pomeroy did not excel at was mathematics. Even high school algebra was such a struggle that she would usually content herself with a grade of C on an otherwise stellar report card. And so, of course, she fell in love with her college math teacher.
Actually it’s hard to say who noticed whom first. Allan Gore, a senior at Southwestern and a teaching assistant in freshman math, picked her out almost from the first day Betty entered his class. It was the eyes and the smile that got him, the innocent sparkle about her, and later it was the way she always spoke up in class, almost as though she were trying to please him personally. But Allan was not the sort of guy to make passes at any girl, much less one of his students, and perhaps nothing ever would have happened had it not been for Betty’s incipient failure at calculus. Midway through her first college semester, she asked to speak to Allan after class one day and requested special tutoring. All Allan remembered of the conversation is that he wouldn’t have refused that smile anything. Allan didn’t think it proper actually to date her, so they met at the library a few times to study. The next semester the tutorial sessions simply continued, and, since Allan wasn’t her teacher anymore, one thing led to another and pretty soon they were seeing each other every night.
There was nothing very dramatic about the courtship. For Betty it was a continuation of high school; she had always dated one guy at a time, usually older boys, and sometimes for long periods. She adored Allan for all the reasons young girls have always adored their teachers. But for Allan the experience was entirely new. Betty was not only a girl who looked marriageable; she was also the first girl he had ever seriously dated.
Allan had grown up on a farm near Larned, just three counties west of Norwich, but, unlike Betty, he had found no great sense of community there. His father was a reserved, taciturn man who worked wheat and sorghum fields from sunup to sundown and sometimes beyond. By the age of ten Allan was a paid hand himself (ten cents an hour, not bad for child labor in 1957), and he began to develop some of the old man’s workaholism. While the town kids were going to movies and dating and driving new cars, Allan remained on the farm, going to Larned only to attend classes at school and then returning to help with the chores or work on his 4-H Club projects. Not that he wanted to be a
farmer himself. The late fifties were bad times for family farming in western Kansas (the Gore spread was only 600 acres), and Allan didn’t see much future in it. But he worked hard at his 4-H activities anyway, raising pigs, planting soybeans, doing woodworking and electrical projects, even entering competitions for cooking and, one year, “grooming.” He raised a calf that was named reserve champion at the county fair (he tried a second time but his entry mysteriously died) and, proudest achievement of all, was named the Kansas State Fair grand champion in wheat competition. To win the big purple ribbon, Allan spent several hours a day for three months picking through wheat stalks with tweezers, rejecting the bad and keeping only the unflawed grain, until he had a gallon jar full of the prettiest amber waves in the West. Congressman Bob Dole gave him a silver tray in front of hundreds of people, and he got a trip to Houston to tour the grain export facilities. More than anything else, that experience made him feel like he had really done something.
Allan was not exactly a loner, but he was not a popular kid either. He played basketball, as every red-blooded boy in Kansas does, but sat on the bench for all of his career. He was a good student but not a great one. The second of five children, he was closest to his older sister, Beth, and when the time came, he followed her to Southwestern College. Allan had saved the money for college himself, mostly by doing farm work, and once he got there, he managed to get two more jobs, washing dishes in the school cafeteria and helping in the mailroom. He dabbled briefly in student politics, taking the conservative side, and eventually became a resident manager in a dormitory. He didn’t do it so much for the free room as for the sense of responsibility it gave him. He felt proud to be trusted with such an important job, even though the sophomores did accuse him of being a lackey for the administration. He was excited at the prospect of learning a new field, too, though he had no idea what it would be. He eventually chose a math major after a professor of statistics took an interest in him and helped him get a teaching assistant’s job. But in other ways college was no different from Larned. He still worked from sunup to sundown.