From 50 years distance, it doesn’t feel the same.
*
The Greeks warned us about Pride.
My St. Ambrose University liberal arts education offered that lesson.
But I cut class that day and played pool.
That was my first mistake.
*
Feeling Left Out
All my buddies had dates: Barrie and Mary Ann, Denny and Linda, Ed and Mary.
Each had met his mate the previous year.
All three couples just celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary.
The fall of 1970 would be our final homecoming weekend at St. Ambrose University.
Kathy had broken up with me a month earlier. She liked my six-foot, blond-haired friend Mike and thought I was too earnest.
You see Mike to my right in the first photo. Who could blame her?
I won the pool match but lost the girl.
A few months later, Kathy would lose Mike to Becky.
Becky and Mike have also been married for 52 years.
Desperation
It wasn’t that funny.
I had asked if any of them were free homecoming weekend.
As you can see, by 1970, the worm had turned at my college, which started accepting women in 1968.
Even dressed up, I struck out.
Wounded pride.
So, I did what any red-blooded Ambrosian male would do.
I started hanging out in the student canteen at Marycrest College, a women’s college about a mile up Locust Street from St. Ambrose.
Marycrest followed St. Ambrose and opened its doors to men in 1969. But in 1970, the competition was still thin.
It was late Friday night, and she was sitting behind a little desk inside the canteen door. I got a Mountain Dew from the pop machine and took a plastic chair on the other side of this small room. Who did she remind me of?
That’s it, Suzanne Pleschette, the doomed teacher in The Birds.
Earnest guys like me never had prepared pick-up lines.
But the two beers had loosened my tongue; no one else was around, and I was desperate.
So, with Dew in hand, I walked over, introduced myself, and probably asked her major. I don’t remember. We chatted a bit — pressure built as the canteen was closing at midnight. Finally, I asked Shari for her phone number.
The Phone Calls
“Why didn’t you ask her to go to Homecoming?” asked Barrie the following day as I cleaned chicken, and he worked the grill at Riefe’s Restaurant, halfway between St. Ambrose and Marycrest.
“There’s no way Suzanne Pleschette does not have a date for homecoming,” I splat.
Today, Barrie lives on the East Coast, just sold his retirement yacht, is, as you know, still with Mary Ann, and was always a step or two ahead of me.
“She didn’t have a date last night,” he rebutted.
I hemmed and hawed all day Sunday.
By Monday afternoon, it was then or never.
There are four things I need to explain. I went to college in my hometown and lived at home with four people: mom, dad, and two younger brothers. We had two phones, one on a counter between the kitchen and family room and another in the TV room upstairs. No privacy.
I never called girls on those phones. Once I started dating, everything, and I mean everything, was secret.
I used a drive-up pay phone three blocks from our house. Shari lived in a dorm where there was one phone for each hall. Whoever answered would find the person.
The cold phone receiver diverted my anxiety. I asked if she would like to attend the Homecoming concert featuring The Association and then dinner.
Silence.
“Let me think about it. Could you call me back on Wednesday?”
So that is what I did.
That was my second mistake.
On Wednesday, Shari said yes.
The Dinner
But first, the concert. That’s The famous Association on a makeshift stage on the gym floor of my high school, Davenport Assumption. St. Ambrose played basketball games at Assumption because its gymnasium was too small. And it had no concert hall.
I have only one memory of the concert.
Thank goodness for the music because Shari and I had nothing to say to each other. We had emptied our conversational tanks a week earlier in the canteen.
I understand now Shari was as desperate as I was. Had she spent Tuesday and Wednesday trying to find a better option? Eventually, she decided something was better than nothing.
We had that in common.
But no chemistry, even before dinner.
At The Plantation.
Yes, in 1970, in Moline, Illinois, there was a restaurant with that name. You can read about its history here. If no tables had been available at the Plantation, my second choice was The Gay Nineties.
The past is a different country.
Something else you might find interesting. Two weekends before homecoming, my sociology professor, Keith Fernsler, took his senior seminar class to Chicago to attend one of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket meetings. In preparation, we read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Yet to be woken, I wanted The Plantation because my parents, who didn’t know anything about my date, took us to this anachronism once a year when we were kids. It’s where my brother Peter threw up on a waitress.
Foreshadowing.
The waiter started with Shari, who, with no hesitation, said
“I’ll have the lobster.”
Who could blame her?
