HOW WE MET: LOOKING BACK TWO GENERATIONS

by Kim Marvel

Our 55-year relationship began when we were juniors in high school. In April, 1970, I approached my future wife and, summing up my courage, asked her to prom. She was standing by her open locker in a nearly empty hallway after school. Her cheeks flushed and, fortunately, she said “Yes.” At the time, she was 16 and I was 17. Now, in our early 70s, we’re reflecting on our years together, realizing our good fortune of finding one another many years ago.

That we even knew each other was the result of chance occurrences years ago. In fact, to find how the stars lined up just right, we must look back two generations. Our story involves, among many elements, the cross-country move by a two-year-old boy, a premature fatal illness, a chance conversation of two strangers on a Kansas train, and the encouragement of an Australian exchange student. To untangle these seemingly unrelated events, some detail is needed to explain how this magically worked out.

Let’s start with my wife’s family, who moved to Alamosa, Colorado in 1961, when Connie was 8 years old. Her father, Max, was born in Illinois in 1925. At age two, with concerns about his health, his parents moved him out west to live with his aunt and uncle in Southern Colorado. Max was raised on his relatives’ farm and attended school in nearby Monte Vista. It was there that he met Margaret. Max and Margaret eloped, moved out of the area, and soon started a family. After 15 years of marriage, tragedy struck. Max died of cancer at age 35. With the help of relatives, Margaret and her six children returned to the Monte Vista area. Within a year Margaret re-married and moved to nearby Alamosa, the home of her new husband. There’s a good ending to this part of the story: Margaret and her second husband had one more child together and provided a stable home for the large family. Despite the loss of their father and upheaval in their lives, the kids were highly successful in school. So, the cross-country move of the two-year-old and, over 30 years later, his tragic premature death were random events that led to Connie growing up in Alamosa, and eventually standing by that hallway locker in the spring of 1970.

My arrival in Alamosa also was determined by events two generations back. In my case, a great-uncle, as a young man in the early 1920s, was traveling by train across Eastern Kansas on his way back home to the panhandle of Oklahoma. He struck up a conversation with the stranger seated next to him. The man told him of employment opportunities in Southern Colorado, particularly at the lumber yard in Monte Vista. As a consequence of that random conversation, my great uncle and four of his siblings moved from the Oklahoma panhandle to the San Luis Valley. Some of them settled permanently in Monte Vista. Years later my dad would share his fond childhood memories of travelling with his parents from Oklahoma to Monte Vista to visit relatives. In the mid-1960s, my parents, then living in Laramie, Wyoming, decided to move to the San Luis Valley for a job at the college in Alamosa. My dad’s positive childhood memories of Monte Vista influenced that choice. We moved to Alamosa in 1966 when I was in junior high. So, that’s how a chance conversation on a train over 100 years ago indirectly set the stage for me to approach my future wife at her high school locker and ask her to prom.

But what about the role of the Australian exchange student? Joanne was living with my family in the spring of 1970. She played a central role as match maker. I privately shared with her my attraction to Connie. Joanne instructed me to overcome my timidity and act assertively before other suitors stepped in first. (Thanks, Joanne, for being there at the right time.) Without her influence, the one-time opportunity would have been missed and this unlikely story may not have happened.

You may have a similar story. Imagine if we had the chance to converse with our ancestors to learn of their decisions about jobs, military service, illness, perhaps random encounters or other life circumstances. Those arbitrary decisions likely determined where we, as their offspring, call home and, consequently, who we chose as life-long friends or lifetime partners. In my case, I’m grateful that events of a hundred years ago - of my wife’s Illinois grandparents’ decision to send their 2-year-old to be raised by relatives out west and my great-uncle’s random conversation riding a train over the Kansas prairie - helped the stars to line up so Connie and I were standing at that hallway locker in 1970.