My parents (that’s them, Eleanor and Allen Searls) were married on 17 August 1946, seventy-five years and two days ago. I would have posted something then, but I was busy—though not too busy to drop something in Facebook, where much of the readership for this blog, plus the writership of others listed in my old blogroll, has drifted in the Age of Social Media. Alas, blogging is less social than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the chatterteriat. But that doesn’t stop me from blogging anyway.
The wedding took place in Minneapolis, for the convenience of Mom’s family of second and third generation Swedish members of the homesteading diaspora, scattered then around Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Pop was from New Jersey, and all his immediate kin were there and in New York. After the wedding the couple came east to briefly occupy the home they rented in North Bergen, New Jersey while mostly hanging at Grandma Searls’ house in Fort Lee (where Pop grew up with his two sisters), and then a short drive west of there in Maywood, where Jan and I grew up. I was born less than a year later, and my sister Jan less than two years after that.
In a comment under my Facebook post, Jan writes,
Mom from ND and Pop from NJ met in Alaska in the middle of WWII. He’d already served in the Costal Artillery in the early 30s but after D-Day came home to join up. They courted by mail after the war while he was with SHAEFE (he loved that acronym: Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Forces Europe), and Mom with the Red Cross at a Naval Hospital in Oregon. When he got home, she flew to NJ for 6 days of courtship – at a small shack at the NJ shore with Pop’s entire family! He came to MN the night before the wedding. They fell in love with the dream of having a family and future together, and always said they really fell in love with each other on their honeymoon and were devoted to each other. Mom was 33, Pop was 38, and they’d already lived lives of adventure, full of friends and family. We grew up knowing were blessed to have them as our parents.
I’ve added links. The Shack is still there, by the way.
Alas, Mom passed in ’03 and Pop in ’79. But they were exceptionally fine parents and grandparents. Not all kids are so lucky.
So, a belated toast, in pixels.
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