The story of how we met and married is interesting.
In the fall of 1969 I was in Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. My roommate was a fellow named Ben Barnes, who was married. One Monday he told me his wife’s parents were coming up from Washington to visit and were bringing his wife’s older sister with them and that I was going to take her out. I said, “Well, let me see a picture to see what I have to deal with.” Of course, Dale turned out to be a beauty, but for whatever reason we weren’t interested in each other and we went our separate ways after that weekend.
After commissioning in November, I was ordered to a school for Civil Engineer Corps Officers at Port Hueneme, California, just up the coast from Los Angeles. After that i was ordered to duty in Saigon in March 1970 for a year’s tour in Vietnam. At the end of that time I was ordered to the San Francisco Bay area for my final tour of duty and discharged in March of 1972. I applied to graduate school at Georgia Tech and was accepted and came to Atlanta in September of 1972.
Unknown to me, Dale volunteered to serve in the Air Force. She went to Texas for flight and survival training and was then direct commissioned as a Captain in the Air Force and became an AirVac nurse, flying the severely wounded from Da Nang and Cam Rahn Bay to hospitals in Japan and Germany and then back home when they were able. She left the Air Force, entered American University to study anesthesia and became a Certified and Registered Nurse Anesthetist. She decided to accept a position at Emory.
As I started my second year of MBA work at Tech in the fall of 1973 I received a letter from Dale’s sister, Sue. I had kept up with her and Ben through the time after OCS. The letter informed me that she was going to have her first child, and that Dale was coming to Atlanta to work at Emory.
In those days it took two weeks to get a phone installed, so all I had was an apartment address. I thought about it, and decided while there weren’t any sparks in 1969, she was really good looking and worth a second effort.
I couldn’t find the apartment, but I had dated a girl who lived in the area and went to her place, lying to here, saying “I’m helping a friend’s old maid aunt move in. Where is this apartment?” She told me and I found it.
I knocked on the door and Dale opened it, looking really messy, as she was moving in. I went into the apartment and there was a guy sitting on the couch, but I ignored him and he got up and left in a few minutes. We enjoyed the afternoon and I asked her if she wanted to go out with me Saturday night at 7pm. She said, “Oh, I’m going sailing with Steve (the guy on the couch) Saturday, and I don’t know if I can be back and ready by 7!” I had let women push me around, but this time I looked her in the eye and said, “If you’re going out with me you’ll be ready at 7”.
She was ready at 7 and we got married a year later.
