Saturday, July 18th, marks 68 years Ken has been the man in my life. On a sultry, summer evening in 1952, I was a bored fourteen-year-old strolling around the Davis Days summer festival with my boyfriend, Ronnie. I loved going on the carnival rides, but they made Ronnie sick.
A bold, sixteen-year-old Kenny stepped up to me and asked, “Would you care to ride on the Ferris wheel?”
I ignored the guy beside me and said an enthusiastic, “Yes!” I didn’t realize it then but that was the beginning of us.
My parents didn’t consider me old enough to date until after the new year. Five more months dragged by before Kenny kissed me goodnight.
By the time my steady boyfriend turned eighteen, President Eisenhower had ended the three-year-old Korean conflict with an armistice. The Cold War, a state of political and military tension between the United States and Russia, continued and so did the draft. Instead of waiting to be conscripted into the army for two years, Kenny began a four-year hitch in the navy. We were in love and I promised to wait for him.
While Ken was aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Bennington seeing the world, doctors diagnosed my lingering cough as tuberculosis. I spent five months in a TB sanitarium recovering from the life-threatening disease.
Seven years after that first Ferris wheel ride, Ken and I were married. We settled on the farm where he was working for his brother-in-law. I followed the pattern for women at that time and quit my office job to be a housewife and mother.
When Ken joined the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Police, we moved to Durand. After our three kids were enrolled in school, I answered an ad to become a community correspondent for our area daily newspaper, the Rockford Morning Star, and discovered the world of freelance writing.
When I said a frivolous yes to a ride on the Ferris wheel with Kenny, I wasn’t thinking beyond the moment. That simple move led to my having a family and a non-fiction writing career.
This December, Adelaide Books, an independent New York business, will publish my memoir, “The View From a Midwest Ferris Wheel.” It’s the story of our seven-year courtship during the 1950s.
What decisions have changed your life?