My Origin Story: How My Parents Met one Fateful Day in the late 1940s

The meeting story of my mom and dad in Charleston in 1947, when he was in the Merchant Marine, is legend.

My mother was quite beautiful and refined. A Southern girl through and trough from a good family. They were rather poor, but highly regarded. My grandfather was one of the pharmacists in the small city where my mother grew up, and was called “Doctor,” and was beloved by all the folks in that town who did business with him in the early decades of the last century.

My father’s parents were Dutch immigrants who were beset by tragedy. They had came over to the U.S. in 1919 to start a new life in what was then, and is now, seen as a land of opportunity.

My father was determined to make a name for himself and go to law school and be a maritime attorney. He had his whole future planned out while he was navigating ships out in the middle of the ocean.

But first, he had to marry a beautiful and refined Southern girl, he decided, and he met my mother “by chance” in a tea room in Charleston where she was dining with friends. Very Southern. Very Charleston at the time in 1947. It was not the kind of place my father would normally frequent, but he had heard about my mother and was determined to meet her. He was off duty from his ship which had docked in Charleston, and he evidently must have had some connections. Or the charms of youth. Probably both.

He obviously succeeded, and this self-confident Yankee from New Jersey swept my small-town mother off her feet. They moved to New Orleans where he attended college and law school at Tulane University. She had a brief teaching career, but in those days wives who could stayed home and tended to their growing families, and the domestic routines and activities common among housewives in the 1950s and 1960s.

She did just that, sacrificing her own ambitions and teaching career. And then….drum roll ….I came along in 1951 and changed everything.

We three kids had a mother to come home to from school every afternoon. She baked cookies and whole wheat bread from scratch. She loved us dearly. We were fortunate children.

This little story is one of very few that I have retained in memory about my parents when they were young, and which I heard from them or my aunts at various times when I was growing up.

A friend and I were discussing our parents, and when she heard my story of their first meeting, and how he successfully wooed her, she wrote this, “I can imagine your parents’ meeting story as a classic movie of that era! In black and white of course — either a melodrama in which your dad is darkly haunted by his parents’ fate, or a musical comedy in which your mom wittily dodges the attention of various genteel suitors, until finally your dad sings and dances his way into her heart?

It’s so interesting how some perceptive people so quickly “get” what you’re saying.

I replied, “I think that’s exactly what he did. And made lots of corny jokes and regaled her with romantic tales of seafaring adventures and of his navigation job in the war, while gazing in his spare time up into the starry sky. In fact, I think they navigated back then partly by the stars.”

I have always been interested in oral history, and both recording and writing the stories of many people, often elders, at the newspapers where I worked in decades past. But my parents? Nothing. So strange when I had the means and knowledge of how to do this. As a result, I know only scattered details of Mom’s upbringing, and almost nothing about my father’s. I might have seen one photo of him in boyhood or as a teenager, age 19, I believe. Nothing else ever.

It’s strange that we know so little about our parents. I perhaps learned more from mom’s 1945 college yearbook than anything else. I recall poring over that treasured keepsake when I was a teenager, trying to glean insights about who my mother was at the college and what she was interested in.

I wish I had asked my mother to talk about her childhood and youth, high school and college years, and early adulthood. When I was so often at the house downtown visiting, and then when I lived there during her last ten years taking care of her, and while her mind was still pretty intact before dementia took its toll, I might have asked her to talk about what it was like for her and her sisters growing up during the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s. I only picked up little bits and pieces about that time over the years. Also, I might have asked her to talk about what I was like when I was young, and how she might have worried about me as I was becoming more of an inward-looking and solitary teenager as each year passed. She knew how my dad felt about me, and she agonized, I feel sure, about how it might have affected me. But it never occurred to me to talk with her about the past, and I really don’t know why. It’s a great mystery and a great regret that I did not record her thoughts about these and so many other things. But I moved away from New Orleans right after college, settling ironically or not in South Carolina, her home state. But maybe we didn’t talk about the past because it was too painful, or awkward, and just not something she cared to do.

As I get older, the bad memories of growing up have gradually receded far into the background of my past, and sunnier visions and memories of my youth now prevail. I think more kindly and forgivingly about my father, though this has only been a more recent development over maybe the past ten years. As with so many, if not most, parent-child relationships, mine with my father was turbulent and fraught, explosive at times and endlessly complex. For decades I didn’t care to know much about his side of the family or about The Netherlands which was his ancestral home. Now at 73 I find myself wishing I could visit Amsterdam and see that beautiful city and appreciate the country and its history and culture by learning of it and seeing it firsthand. My father was very proud of the Dutch and what that small country accomplished and contributed to the world.

In a sign of how much I have mellowed I recently bought two books related to The Netherlands (“The Diary Keepers: World War II in The Netherlands and the People Who Lived Through It,” and “Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of The Netherlands.”). Additionally, Dutch Gouda cheese is now my favorite, whereas until a couple of years ago I never ate it because it reminded me of my father. Time does heal, or at least helps me progress on that never-ending healing and forgiving path I hope not to wander too far from ever again..

Such is the case now, and the meeting story of my parents, when they were flush with youth, deep love for each other, and their many plans for a bright future, always brings a smile and the realization that if it weren’t for that little tea room in Charleston back in 1947, it’s very likely I wouldn’t be here today writing this and pondering the mysteries of human nature, the forms of love between parent and child, and the nature of forgiveness, at which I have come a long way. I still have a long way to go. Forgiving others of wrongs grievously, or subtly, inflicted on me, is one of the hardest things in life to do.