My Redacted Life: Chapter 31: (Cont._4)

Women appeared more and more in the news as July of 1972 progressed, along with plans for our wedding. The world began learning what I already knew. Women were shedding their bonds. A strong woman, and they could all be strong when it suited them, would become a force with which to reckon in the future. I learned more about that daily. The guys down at the coffee shop didn’t much like it, but that mattered very little.

That month alone saw some news, front-page and not society-section, that should have alerted the most ardent misogynists to this new tectonic shift in our societal substructure. Signs were that, in the future, the feminine half of our species would lay increasing claim to a place at the table so to speak. Had men been paying attention, they might have noticed.

On the first day of the month, for example Gloria Steinem published the first edition of a feminist magazine, "Ms." It featured Wonder Woman on the cover. Message delivered.

Less than a week later, the FBI swore in Susan Lynn Roley & Joanne E Pierce as its first two female members. What would “Jedger” have thought about that? One can only wonder.

The sports world began to take notice. Tennis star Billy Jean King was drawing attention to women’s tennis, making a bunch of male chauvinists nervous. Women golfers such as American Susie Maxwell Berning drew their own share of attention.

In politics, Jean Westwood became the first woman chosen to head the Democratic National Committee. A wag at the downtown men’s health club wondered, “What next, some babe wanting to run for president?”

“Nah,” another said, “We’ll have a [adjective deleted] president before we have a woman one.”

I paid little attention at the time, I was still fixated on “manly-man” things. Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles with her quiet roar. Paul McCartney responded by forming his own band, something called “Wings.” I gave it little chance of success. In Northern Ireland and England, they were murdering the hell out of one another. Sometimes I wondered if Matthew Arnold hadn’t nailed it when he wrote that, “ … peace has left the upper world. And now keeps only in the grave.” After all, we were still shipping full caskets home from South Vietnam.

All this time, I was an American male, and I had “laid down my sword and shield,” so news slid off me as did concern of any decline in male hegemony. What did I have to fear? I had a good job, and evenings saw me undergoing “groom-training,” taught by Brenda, Vernell, and my neighbor. I had no time for so-called “women’s lib.”

Tonight’s lesson centered on my script. “Three lines is all you have,” Venell said. “How could you blow that? Let’s try again. She took my shoulders, rather roughly I thought, and positioned me next to Brenda, who seemed a bit out of patience. “Now,” said Vernell.

“I will. I do. And I wed you with …”

“Stop, dammit stop,” Venell yelled. “With this ring I do thee wed.”

“Ya’ll are making me nervous,” I said.

My neighbor responded, moving in close to me, “We’re going to make you think ‘nervous,’ Buster.”

I pointed at her blouse and looked at Vernell. She said to her sister, “Button up, dammit, and don’t you own a bra?”

They made adjustments. I turned to Brenda for solace. She looked at me with those sweet eyes that had so captivated me when I met her. “Don’t screw this up,” she said. “My relatives are even coming down from Chicago for it. You’d damn well better be ready, and, … look at me when I’m talking to you, … sober.”

Such soothing balm got me through the evening. Later, I found myself keyed up and not ready for bed, so I flicked on the ten o’clock news. I sat in my most comfortable chair with a beer and waited for some indication that the world was stable and level and I wouldn’t be facing any new challenges to societal norms.

Then, there it was, like an oracle shouting “Get ready for more.”

From war-torn England came another subterranean rumble. That week had seen the international debut of something called a “Gay Pride March.”

"Sweetie, you don't mind if
I call you Sweetie, do you?
You screw this wedding up, and
a ton of bricks will land on you."

My Redacted Life: Chapter 31 (Cont._3)

Marriage loomed a month away. We were stressed by the plans, haunted by doubts, and nervous about the future. Feeling edgy, we went fishing. Lake Conway was nearby and the landings there rented boats and motors. What else could a young couple in love do to settle their nerves?

The bream were biting just enough that day to keep our minds occupied. Still, we made plans for the future. I would become a partner in the firm and gain a reputation for excellence. Maybe I would work on a Master's degree. She would do something someday other than teaching.

Why had she gone into teaching?

“The guidance counselors never told us that girls could do anything else.”

“Oh?”

“Well girls weren’t supposed to go to college in the first place.”

“Oh?”

“Oh no. It was okay to live in a college town, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” if you were there to work on your PhT.”

“PhT?”

“Putting hubby through.”

“Oh.”

She yanked her line and pulled in a small bream, wriggling and thrashing as if its life depended upon it, which it did. She unhooked it, examined it, and said, “Go grow a little.” She tossed it into the lake.

I watched her and said, “Where did you learn to fish?”

She shrugged. “Where did you?”

That caught me off guard. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve just always known how.”

“So you think I am any different? Hand me the cricket box. Then turn around and face the other direction.”

I did as I was told and held onto the sides of the boat as a good deal of commotion occurred at the other end.

What was I getting myself into?

After a few moments, calm returned and she said, “You can turn around now.”

She had already baited her hook and tossed the line into the water. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Finally, I broke the silence. “Why did you decide to teach the third grade?”

She looked down the boat at me. “Because they wouldn’t let me run the torture ward.”

“Oh.”

She examined her bait and threw it back in. “I’ll bet you were a perfect student, weren’t you?”

“Hardly,” I said. “I was the youngest in the class and easily led astray. How about you?”

“Mostly perfect.”

“Mostly?”

“Except for the time I got sent home in grade school.”

“Sent home? For what?”

“This boy pushed me and called me ‘fatty.’ So I hit him in the face and broke his glasses.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Mama and Daddy had to buy him a new pair.”

“Oh.”

“Know what though?”

“No. What?”

“None of the other kids ever called me ‘fatty’ again.”

“I can imagine.”

We fished in silence as I wondered if rich folks in those big skyscrapers up north ever spent such wonderful times while they were waiting to get married.

Teach a girl to dig her own fish bait
and she'll take care of herself forever.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 31 (Cont._2)

Somewhere in the process of planning this August wedding, I asked Brenda if, maybe she might just want to elope. The look she gave me would have melted Kryptonite.

“Things aren’t just about me, or us,” my future Trophy Wife explained. “They are for other people as well,” adding “stupid” as a form of gentle emphasis.  I got the point but she continued nonetheless.

“My mama and daddy worked hard to raise me and they deserve a nice, but affordable, wedding, not a Las Vegas production nor a beach party extravaganza by any means, but a nice wedding they can remember for their only daughter.”

At that point, I chose to stay out of the whole thing. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Vernell would be her Maid of Honor, my brother best man, and my neighbor in charge of logistics. I knew nothing about church weddings, having never attended one. I felt like the late Jerry Clower who once remarked that in the first football game he ever saw, he was a starting lineman.

The last wedding, of any sort, I had observed was on a Saturday when college friend Leland Bassett called and said he had to get married. That day. Leland always moved a little faster than the curves allowed, but this caper took the cake, so to speak. Somehow, a friend of the bride-to-be's mother located a county employee in Tulsa who agreed to sneak into the courthouse and get a marriage license (this was Oklahoma, mind you). That minor obstacle overcome, we, after some exertion, found a county judge in Nowata, Oklahoma who performed the ceremony around eight o’clock that evening in his bathrobe.

We all assumed that some untoward news had prompted the urgency, but no. Leland was just the sort of person who, having decided to do something, went about it without delay and at full speed. A couple of years or so later, when I was in the Navy, he and his wife had their first child, a beautiful little girl. This adventure, the one-day wedding, occurred in the 1960s and didn’t strike many as too odd at the time. Not much did in those days.

After a couple of beers one night, I told Brenda that story as she was busy sewing dresses for the wedding.

She didn’t think it was very funny, and told me so.

Before I knew it, she had
told the whole world, via
the old Arkansas Gazette.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 31

As my marriage date of August 17, 1972 approached, I concentrated on work as best I could. I was learning a lot more about urban planning than I was about women, but what the heck? Our firm had gotten an engineering contract for a street project in Pine Bluff. What seemed simple was to get complicated.

The engineer and his staff, in close communication with the city engineer in Pine Bluff, began laying out plans to construct the street according to the standards outlined in the existing master street plan of the city. It had been adopted years earlier and, of course, our firm had nothing to do with the standards it proposed. To ignore or violate those standards would have invited censure.

The editor of the local newspaper, Paul Greenberg saw a chance to make print, using an out-of-town firm as an invading army, hovering over the city and drooling with monstrous intent. Instead of a needed project, he constructed it, journalistically, as the intrusion of a white power structure into a minority community that was simply minding its own business. He phrased it as a classic case of pleasing the rich at the expense of the poor.

Day after day, he pounded upon the unjustness of improving a street serving this peaceful neighborhood. He found an audience with a local business owner who would have profited from the improvements but who had political hopes that outweighed advantages to his business. The contrived controversy eventually placed him on the city council.

The city agreed to reduce the scope of improvements. Then the project became one designed to destroy the existing neighborhood by encouraging suburban sprawl. It got real ugly.

The odd thing was that the city had received money for street improvements that could have been used for any number of projects in any number of neighborhoods. The mayor and council had chosen this street specifically because it would have benefited a minority community, at least the elected officials saw it that way.

It didn’t concern me much, this affair. The engineering staff suffered by not being paid for all the redesign and receiving much personal vilification. I used it as a learning experience, to wit:

No good deed ever goes unpunished.

Keep an eye on journalists. I found, over the years, that most were decent folks. They weren’t your friend, simply fellow professionals out to do their job. You didn’t lie to them and you didn’t try to use them for your own purposes. They live on information, whether it benefits you or not. Learn to live with it. Failure to do so will make you look silly and guilty. Finally, most journalists are ethical. Greenberg was an exception.

Projects must be vetted through the neighborhood in which the project is to exist. Many neighborhoods in our country have suffered and died, and will continue to do so, because of projects designed not for the people who live there but for people who are just passing through.

Plans aren’t always perfect and life is not always fair.

And, as the Vietnamese say, a bad strategy and good tactics means defeat. It just may take longer than will a combination of bad strategy and bad tactics.

I tried telling my bride-to-be about these things and more. She feigned interest, but I could tell her mind was in August.

"That which does not kill us makes
 us stronger." - Friedrich Nietzsche 

My Redacted Life: Chapter 30 (Cont._3)

So, we go to see the preacher at the Methodist Church in Lonoke to plan our wedding scheduled for August 17, 1972. He was underwhelmed. I can’t say as how I blame him. He had been pastor there a couple of years, and had never met Brenda. She had been in college, she explained.

The last time I had been in church was while in college and that’s because I was trying to impress one of the sorority girls at the house where I served as janitor. I explained that I had been in the Navy and left the sorority girl part out.

Didn’t they have churches in Conway, Arkansas? She admitted only that she supposed so.

Didn’t they have services on Navy ships and installations? I didn’t know for sure. It was the new, modern Navy and all. They didn’t even call the female sailors “Waves” anymore and the most famous enlisted man serving then was a highly impressive African-American named Carl Brashear, a man truly worth worshiping in his own right.

The preacher showed no interest in either my Navy career or our excuses. After some obligatory wrangling, he agreed to perform the service, albeit somewhat enthusiastically. He was particularly fixated upon my former residency in San Francisco. I clammed up and we continued.

The only hiccup occurred when he got to the service itself.

“Were we interested in writing our own?”

“No, and the shorter the better.”

He had started to go over the service when Brenda interrupted. “In the woman’s part, does it have that ‘love, honor, and obey’ stuff?”

He blinked and said, “In the traditional service it does.”

“We want that ‘obey’ part left out.”

He actually looked at me for confirmation, not a smart move on his part. I just shrugged. He made a note.

The ordeal finally ended. He promised to marry us, and we promised to come to church with Brenda’s parents when we happened to be in Lonoke of a Sunday morning. There would be no stricture concerning the need to obey anyone, no matter what The Apostle had to say about the matter.

We were soon in the Green Angel with the top off, her red hair billowing, and breathing, once more, the “air of the heathen.”

Actually, I was to find the Methodists a warm, progressive lot. I’ve never heard a bona-fide Methodist minister preach a hint of hatred. They concentrate a lot on the concept of “grace” and struggle with, rather than worship, riches. I’ve never heard one tell a terrified five-year old about a place where their precious little body might burn forever. It’s the new, modern church, I suppose.

Oh, and speaking of Master Chief Boatswain's Mate (and Master Diver) Carl Brashear. I served with him on the old USS Hunley, a singular honor in my life. They later made a film, starring Cuba Gooding, of his life. I don’t think he suffered from bone spurs. Had he, it would have affected only one heel, the other having been lost, along with part of his leg, years before I served with him, in a diving mission for our Navy.

Me, obey a man?
Yeah right.

My Redacted Life: Sunday Break

Sunday deserves a quick note to bring you up to date on our recent betrothment. As I reported earlier, Brenda planned a church wedding, a modest one out of respect for her hard-working parents. We had, well, she and Vernell had—I wasn't actually consulted—picked the date of August 19th, a Saturday. That would leave enough time for a brief honeymoon and to have the records changed at the school where she taught. She would begin the new school year as "Mrs. von Tungeln" although she had considered using the old-fashioned style like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had, where she would just keep her original name. But, she decided to go modern and "Mrs." it would be.

All was set. She reserved the date at the family's church, the Methodist one in Lonoke.

Then things got screwy.

The pastor called to inform her that he had reneged on the date because a young couple wanted it. He didn't mention family wealth, prestige, or untoward time constraints, just that this young couple was "really in love." That seemed to settle it.

A mild, but not debilitating panic set in. To postpone our wedding for a week wouldn't allow time for the name-change paperwork. Moving it up a week would create furor over an already cramped schedule. What to do?

Hell, why not get married on, say a Thursday evening? That fit the schedule of all concerned.

"So let it be written, so let it be done," Brenda announced in her most Pharaoh-like manner. My only thought was that I was glad we hadn't bothered to have the date of our marriage engraved on our wedding rings, now safely ensconced in the lay-away at Cave's Jewelry. I just wanted the thing over with. I wasn't comfortable being up in front of people.

So, we accommodated both  a young couple and our own plans without further complication. I've always wanted to check on the marriage that claimed the Saturday night slot. I never have. The percentages, though, for the long-term success of marriages of young couples who were "really in love" at that time, were no better than 40 percent, probably a little lower for rich kids in that part of the world. I've always figured 18 months, tops.

Next, we would meet the preacher.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 30 (Cont._2)

Somewhere around the summer of 1972, I decided to take correspondence course in public administration from Berkeley. The company paid for it and I learned a few things. The last assignment was to interview some public official and write a report on the outcome.

I decided upon the city manager of Little Rock, the state’s largest city. At that time, John T. “Jack” Meriwether occupied the office. I got through to him on the phone, and he graciously granted me the interview.

Jack Meriwether had been the city manger of Texarkana previously and would subsequently devote his life to higher education, the newspaper business, and banking. The Meriwether name would become synonymous with public service in our state.

The interview went well. Toward the end, I asked what would always be a key question in interviews of public officials. “What would you say is the most challenging part of your job?”

I expected some timeworn answer directed at the difficulties in dealing with the disparate and conflicting demands of public policy, or the constant struggle with balancing the need for municipal services against a lack of resources.

Instead, he gave me a gem that would stick with me for my entire career. He said his most challenging task was dealing with the “uh-huh …oh" syndrome.

“Say what?”

He smiled at my confusion and explained. “When politicians are campaigning for election, they always run around pointing at things and saying “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

I waited.

He leaned back in his chair and said, “Then when they are elected, and begin to see what the situation really is, they say, ‘Oh,’ and expect me to work it out.”

My instructor out in California thought that was a good story and gave me and “A” in the course.

Over the years, I’ve thought about that comment countless times. Some things never change, do they?

I chose my subject well.