A Not So Brief Encounter

“1912, it was, in Idaho, in Filer, about 5 miles from Twin Falls, where I lived later.  My mother was born in Minnesota and my dad was born in Nebraska, and they met.  My Mother was visiting her cousins in Oregon, and she had gotten on a train, and she saw a young man walking outside her window, walking along, eying her.  And she didn’t think anything of it and pretty quickly he came and asked if anyone was sitting in the next seat, and she said no, and he sat down and they started talking and they got acquainted.  And so he got off at a hotel, he was going up to Canada, he had land up there so he was going up there to see if he could sell it, and she went home to Minnesota.  And they started writing back and forth and then they were married.  For a year and a half they had been writing and they were married in October.

So it sort of paralleled with my husband and I.  William Ward’s parents were from England and her parents were born in Germany.  They got married in Minnesota and then they moved to Oregon.  She was a Lutheran and my Dad was a Methodist. You see when I was working- I was a telephone operator in Twin Falls- when I was working I had a split shift, sometimes I would work from eight to twelve, sometimes from six to ten, I would be going to work as he was coming home.  He had moved too, when he had graduated from BYU, he had got a job in Twin Falls, and I would go back to my office and tell my friends ‘I saw the man I am going to marry,’ so, he would just smile at me and I would smile back, I didn’t speak to him and I didn’t get acquainted with him yet.

That was during the summer.  Then I saw him all summer.  I would go back and forth, walking and he would be walking home and we would be passing each other on the street.  At New Years I had a date.  In Twin Falls they had a radio station that had a big New Year’s Ballroom and they had the big bands come in, this was a big band, and so we went to the dance and he was there and he asked me for a dance and so I did. And then he asked me for a date for the next day, New Year’s Day.

So that’s how we got acquainted and we dated for all that year and then, New Year’s Day, the following New Year’s- it was one year later- we were married.”