D is for Dance Card: The Dating Game. No. 4 of 26 posts in the April 2024 Blogging From #AtoZChallenge. Theme: My Life: The Prequel (in Snapshots) adding my parents’ stories to the family history mix. Please join me on the journey.
Growing up, my siblings and I sometimes complained about having such a long surname — hard to pronounce, hard to fit onto school forms, you know the drill.
And of course we held our parents, Norm and Peg (Laurence) Charboneau, responsible.
“Well, you might have had a much shorter name if things had gone differently,” Dad would quip, glancing at Mom — and they’d both laugh.
Mom’s other beau
Turns out that Mom had been dating another guy before Dad — we’ll call him Bruce Clark. And his name was short enough to fit onto one line of the tiny Dance Card dangling from Mom’s wrist at the regular sorority balls she attended while at Potsdam State Teachers College.
Apparently Mom and Bruce were still a item when Dad returned from the Navy to resume his electrical engineering studies at nearby Clarkson Tech. Bruce was at Clarkson, too, studying chemical engineering — but he also had some musical talent, which probably appealed to my music-major mom. Dad, alas, could never carry a tune.
Dad’s summer romance
Meanwhile, in 1946 my dad was fresh back from the Navy and making a bit of a splash in his hometown, where he spent the summer helping out at his parents’ Otter Lake Hotel before returning to Clarkson.
Tall, slim, and handsome in his Navy uniform, Dad apparently took a shine to one of the hotel employees. Decades later, Dad told me she was the inspiration for the character Rosy in his semi-autobiographical novel Labor Day Mystery: A Red Flannel Yarn (quoted below).
“Rosemary ‘Rosy’ Kent was the chambermaid for the Inn…She was also Norman’s summer romance, only slightly older than he was….She had a crown of shining, short, tawny curls, brown eyes and a square determined jaw. Her wide, smiling, full lips over teeth made orthodonticaly prefect from her winter earnings as a beautician, hairdresser and facial specialist, completed the view.”
In the end, though, neither Bruce nor Rosy stood a chance once my parents met. They may have provided a point of comparison and a few youthful memories of the dating years, but my Mom and Dad ultimately chose one another as life partners — bequeathing to us kids our long, but genealogically interesting, surname.
Up next, E is for Engineering at Clarkson: Dad in College. Please stop back! Meanwhile, please visit the other Awww Monday bloggers by clicking on the link below.
Powered by Linky Tools
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…
© 2024 Molly Charboneau. All rights reserved.