Candy was pretty. I remember thinking That’s one good looking girl. She had an exuberance about her that I liked. She was bubbly, sort of all over the place, talking to this one and that. She laughed easily, and during the few minutes that we talked she made me feel good.
At five feet seven, Candy was about half a foot shorter than I am. Her hair fluffed around her face in the popular Afro style. But most of all, I was drawn to her effervescent personality. Maybe because I tend to be quiet and introspective, and she was so outgoing and friendly, I admired her from the start.
At Yale, mutual friends often said, “Ben, you ought to get together with Candy.” I later found out that friends would say to her, “Candy, you and Ben Carson ought to get together. You just seem right together.”
Though I was beginning my third year of college when we met, I definitely wasn’t ready for love. With my lack of finances, my single-minded goal to become a doctor, and the long years of study and internship that I faced, falling in love was the last thing on my mind. I’d come too far to get sidetracked by romance. Another factor entered into the picture, too. I’m rather shy and hadn’t done much dating. I’d gone out with small groups, dated now and then, but had never gotten into any serious relationship. And I didn’t plan on any either.
Once school began, I saw Candy occasionally since we were both in the premed program. “Hi,” I’d call out. “How are you doing in your classes?”
“Fantastic,” she’d usually say.
“You’re adjusting all right then?” I asked the first time.
“I think I’m going to get straight A’s.”
As we chatted I’d think, This girl must be really smart. And she was.
I was even more amazed when I learned that she played violin in the Yale Symphony and Bach Society—not a position for just anybody who could play an instrument. These folks were top-grade musicians. As the weeks and months passed by, I learned more and more intriguing things about Candy Rustin. The fact that she was musically talented and knew classical music gave us something to talk about as we’d pass from time to time on campus.
However, Candy was just another student, a nice person, and I didn’t have any particularly warm feelings toward her. Or perhaps, with my head in my books and my sights set on medical school, I wouldn’t let myself consider how I really felt about the bright and talented Candy Rustin.
About the time Candy and I started talking more often and for longer periods, the church in New Haven which I attended needed an organist.
I had mentioned our choir director, Aubrey Tompkins, to Candy several times, because he was an important part of my life. After I joined the church choir, Aubrey would come by and pick me up on Friday evenings for rehearsal. During my second year my roommate Larry Harris, who was also an Adventist, joined the choir. Often on Saturday nights Aubrey took Larry and me to his home, and we grew to know his family well. At other times he showed us the sights of New Haven. An opera buff, Aubrey invited me several times to go with him on Saturday nights to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
“Say, Candy,” I told her one day, “I just thought of something. You’re a musician. Our church needs an organist. What do you think? Would you be interested in the job? They pay the organist, but I don’t know how much.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Sure,” she said, “I’d like to try it.”
Then I paused with a sudden thought. “Do you think you could play the music? Aubrey gives us some difficult stuff.”
“I can probably play anything with practice.”
So I told Aubrey Tompkins about Candy. “Fantastic!” he responded. “Have her come for an audition.”
Candy came to the next choir rehearsal and played the large electric organ. She played well, and I was happy just to see her up there, but the violin was her instrument. She could play anything written for the violin. And although Candy had played the organ for her high school baccalaureate service, she hadn’t had much of an opportunity to keep in practice. She had no idea that Aubrey Tompkins liked to throw us into the heavy stuff, particularly Mozart, and she wasn’t quite up to it on the organ.
Aubrey let her play a few minutes; then he said kindly, “Look, dear, why don’t you sing in the choir?”
She could have had her feelings hurt, but Candy had enough self-confidence to take it in stride. A master on the violin, the organ wasn’t her principal instrument. “All right,” she said. “I guess I’m not so hot on the organ.”
So Candy walked over to where we were singing and joined in. She had a lovely alto voice. And I was delighted when she joined us. She was a real addition to the choir. Everyone loved her from that first night, and, because she liked singing with us, Mt. Zion became Candy’s church too from then on.
She wasn’t overly religious, didn’t talk much about spiritual or religious things, and had no significant Biblical background. But she was open and ready to learn.
After Candy started attending our church, she enrolled in special Bible classes that lasted from autumn to spring. I used to go with her one or two nights each week, learning a great deal about the Bible myself, and enjoying her company at the same time.
As Candy reflects on her spiritual journey, she says she always seemed to have a hunger for God. But what made it different for her in the Adventist church? “The people,” she says. “They loved me into the faith.”
Her family thought it was strange for her to join with Christians who went to church on Saturday. Yet eventually they not only accepted her decision, but Candy’s mother became an active Adventist herself.
Candy and I soon fell into the habit of meeting each other after class. We walked across campus together or occasionally went into New Haven.
I was beginning to like Candy a lot.
Just before Thanksgiving of 1972, when I was in my final year at Yale and Candy was a sophomore, the admissions office paid our way to do recruiting in the high schools in the Detroit area. They provided us with an expense account, so I rented a little Pinto, and with our extra money we were able to eat in several nice restaurants. It was just the two of us, and we had a wonderful time.
We spent a lot of time together and the reality slowly came to me that I liked Candy quite a lot. More than I’d been aware of; more than I’d ever liked a girl.
Yale had recruited Candy and me to interview students who had combined SATs of at least twelve hundred. After going to all the inner-city schools in Detroit, we didn’t find one student who had a combined SAT score to reach that total. To interview any students, Candy and I had to visit places in the more affluent communities like Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe. We found plenty of students to interview who wanted to talk about attending Yale, but we didn’t recruit any minorities.
On the trip Candy met my mother and some of my friends. Consequently, we ended up staying a little longer in Detroit than I had planned. I needed to have the rented Pinto back at the agency by 8:00 the next morning. That meant we had to drive straight through from Detroit.
The weather had been cold. A light snow had fallen the day before, although most of it had melted. Since leaving Yale ten days earlier, I hadn’t once had an adequate night’s sleep, because of our work and wanting to spend time with friends.
“I don’t know if I can stay awake,” I told Candy with a yawn. Most of the driving would be on the interstate highways, which makes driving monotonous.
Candy and I later disagreed on how she answered. I thought she said something like, “Don’t worry, Ben, I’ll keep you awake.” She hadn’t had any more sleep than I had. She says her words were, “Don’t worry, Ben, you’ll stay awake.”
We started back to Connecticut. Back then, the speed limit was 70 miles per hour, but I must have been hitting close to 90. And what could be more boring to my sleep-starved body than watching endless median marks flashing by on a dark, moonless night?
By the time I crossed the line into Ohio, Candy had drifted off to sleep, and I didn’t have the heart to a
waken her. Though we’d had a wonderful time, the days away from school had been hard on both of us, and I figured that maybe she’d rest a couple of hours, then be fully awake and take over the wheel.
About one in the morning I was zooming along Interstate 80 and recall passing a sign that indicated we were nearing Youngstown, Ohio. With my hands relaxed on the wheel, the car flew along at 90 miles per hour. The heater, turned on low, kept us comfortably warm. It had been half an hour or more since I’d seen another vehicle. I felt relaxed, everything under control. Then I floated into a comfortable sleep too. The vibration of the car striking the metal illuminators that separate each lane jarred me into consciousness. My eyes popped open as the front tires struck the gravel shoulder. The Pinto veered off the road, the headlights streaming into the blackness of a deep ravine. I yanked my foot off the gas pedal, grabbed the steering wheel, and fiercely jerked to the left.
In those action-packed seconds, my life flashed before my eyes. I’d heard people say that a slow-motion review of life tumbles through the mind just before one dies. This is a prelude to death, I thought. I’m going to die. A panorama of experiences from early childhood to the present rolled across my mind. This is it. This is the end. The words kept rumbling through my head.
Going at that speed, the car should have flipped over, but a strange thing happened. Because of my overcorrection with the steering wheel, the car went into a crazy spin, around and around like a top. I released the wheel, my mind fully concentrating on being ready to die.
Abruptly the Pinto stopped — in the middle of the lane next to the shoulder — headed in the right direction, the engine still running. Hardly aware of what I was doing, my shaking hands slowly turned the wheel and pulled the car off onto the shoulder. A heartbeat later an eighteen-wheeler transport came barreling through on that lane.
I cut off the ignition and sat quietly, trying to breathe normally again. My heart felt as if it were racing at 200 beats a minute. “I’m alive!” I kept repeating. “Praise the Lord. I can’t believe it, but I’m alive. Thank You, God. I know You’ve saved our lives.”
Candy must have really been tired, for she’d slept through the whole terrible experience. My voice reached inside her sleep, though, and she opened her eyes. “Why are we parked here? Anything wrong with the car?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
There must have been an edge to my voice, for she said, “Don’t be like that, Ben. I’m sorry I fell asleep—I didn’t mean to —”
I took a deep breath. “Everything’s fine,” I said and smiled at her through the darkness.
“Everything can’t be fine if we’re not moving. What’s going on? Why are we stopped?”
I leaned forward and flipped on the ignition. “Oh, just a quick rest,” I said casually, as I began to accelerate and pull onto the road.
“Ben, please — “
With a mixture of fear and relief, I let the car come to a stop far onto the road shoulder and turned off the key. “OK,” I sighed. “I fell asleep back there …” My heart still pounded, my muscles were tense as I told her what happened. “I thought we were going to die,” I concluded. I could hardly say the last words aloud.
Candy reached across the seat and put her hand in mine. “The Lord spared our lives. He’s got plans for us.”
“I know,” I said, feeling just as certain of that fact as she did.
Neither of us slept the rest of the trip. We talked the whole time, the words flowing naturally between us.
At one point Candy said, “Ben, why are you always so nice to me? Like tonight. I did go to sleep when I probably should have stayed awake and talked to you.”
“Well, I’m just a nice guy.”
“It’s more than that, Ben.”
“Oh, I like being nice to second-year Yale students.”
“Ben. Be serious.”
The first brush of violet painted the horizon. I looked straight ahead, both hands on the wheel. Something unfamiliar fluttered in my chest as Candy persisted.
“Why?” It was hard to stop joking, hard to let the mask fall away and say the actual words. “I guess,” I said, “it’s because I like you. I guess I like you a lot.”
“I like you a lot too, Ben. More than anybody else I’ve ever met.”
I didn’t answer but let the car slow down, eased it off the road, and stopped. It took only a moment to put my arms around Candy and kiss her. It was our first kiss. Somehow I knew she’d kiss me back.
We were two naive kids, and neither of us knew much about dating or carrying on a romance. But we both understood one thing—we loved each other.
From then on, Candy and I were inseparable, spending every possible minute together. Oddly enough, our growing relationship didn’t detract me from my studies. Having Candy at my side, always encouraging me, made me just that more determined to work hard.
Candy didn’t shirk her studies either. She was a triple major, carrying enough courses for music, psychology, and premed. Subsequently she dropped the premed to concentrate more on her music. Candy is one of the brightest people I know, good at whatever she does.*
One problem that bothered many in the premed program was getting into medical school after graduation. The system for medical training requires students to spend four years earning an undergraduate degree and then, if accepted by a medical school, to undergo another four years of intensive training.
“If I don’t make it into med school,” one of my classmates said several times, “I’ve just been wasting all this time.”
“I don’t know if I’ll get in at Stanford,” one premed said to me, after he had sent in his application. “Or anywhere else,” he added.
Another mentioned a different school, but the students’ worries were essentially the same. I seldom got involved in what I called freaking out, but this kind of talk happened often, especially during our senior year.
One time when this freaking out was going on and I didn’t enter in, one of my friends turned to me. “Carson, aren’t you worried?”
“No,” I said. “I’m going to the University of Michigan Medical School.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’s real simple. My Father owns the university.”
“Did you hear that?” he yelled at one of the others. “Carson’s old man owns the University of Michigan.”
Several students were impressed. And understandably, because they came from extremely wealthy homes. Their parents owned great industries. Actually I had been teasing, and maybe it wasn’t playing fair. As a Christian I believe that God— my Heavenly Father—not only created the universe, but He controls it. And, by extension, God owns the University of Michigan and everything else.
I never did explain.
After graduating in 1973 from Yale, I ended up with a fairly respectable grade point average, although far from the top of the class. But, I knew I had done my best and put forth the maximum effort; I was satisfied.
Aside from my joking, I had no doubts about being accepted at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in their School of Medicine. I applied there and since I had believed so strongly that God wanted me to be a doctor, I had no doubts about being accepted. Several of my friends wrote to half a dozen medical schools, hoping one would accept them. For two reasons I applied there and to only a few others. First, the University of Michigan was in my home state, which meant much lower school expenses for the next four years. Second, U of M had the reputation for being one of the top schools in the nation.
I had also applied to Johns Hopkins, Yale’s medical school, Michigan State, and Wayne State. My acceptance from U of M came extremely early, so I immediately withdrew from the others. Candy still had two years of schooling at Yale when I began medical school, but we found ways to bridge time and space. We wrote to each other every single day. Even today both of us have boxes of love letters we saved.
When we could afford to, we used the telephone. One time I
called her at Yale, and I don’t know what happened, but neither of us seemed able to stop talking. Maybe we were both extra lonely. Maybe we’d both been having a hard time. Maybe we just needed to be together, to keep contact when our lives were so far apart. Anyway, we talked for six straight hours. At the time I didn’t care. I loved Candy, and every second on the telephone was precious.
The next day I began to worry about paying the telephone bill. In one letter I joked about having to make payments all through my medical career. I wondered what the telephone company could do to a poor medical student who had even less sense than money.
I kept waiting and dreading the day when I actually saw the bill. Strangely enough, the 6-hour call never came through. I couldn’t have paid it anyway—certainly not the whole amount — so I confess I didn’t investigate the reason. As Candy and I talked it over later, we theorized that the phone company looked at the charges, and some executive decided that no one could possibly talk that long.
The summer between college graduation and medical school found me back to my old routine of hunting a job. And, as I had experienced before, I couldn’t find any employment. This time I had started making contacts in the spring, three months before graduation. But Detroit was in the middle of an economic depression, and many employers said, “Hire you? Right now we’re laying off people.”
At that time my mother was caring for the children of the Sennet family—Mr. Sennet was the president of Sennet Steel. After hearing my sad tales, Mother told her employer about me. “He needs a job real bad,” she said. “Is there any way you could help him?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’d be happy to give your son a job. Send him over.”
He hired me. I was the only one at Sennet Steel with a summer job. To my surprise, my foreman taught me how to operate the crane, a very responsible job, for it involved picking up stacks of steel weighing several tons. Whether he realized it or not, the operator had to have an understanding of physics to be able to visualize what he was doing as he moved the boom over and down to the steel. The immense stacks of steel had to be picked up in a certain way to prevent the bundles from swinging. Then the operator worked the crane to carry the steel over and into trucks that were parked in an extremely narrow space.
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