Anniversary Bash Revives Old Memories

Our sons and daughters-in-law gave a party for us the other day in celebration of our 50th wedding anniversary.

It was a bash to remember.

The scene was our younger son’s new house off Linda Vista in Pasadena, a gorgeous place in a sylvan setting with a view of the San Gabriels. My wife and I made only one contribution: We hired the mariachis, who showed up in white pants and robin’s egg blue jackets and performed for two hours beside the swimming pool with spirit and passion.

Our children had invited the few relatives with whom I still have contact, and all my wife’s relatives, who are numerous, and mostly from Bakersfield.

My own relatives were my cousin Annabel, my niece Diane, my nephew Warren and his mother Phyllis, my brother’s widow (who has been twice remarried). We couldn’t decide whether she is still my sister-in-law, but I insist that she is.

My wife’s family is harder to account for. There was her sister and her sister’s daughter and her daughter’s son and his wife and three children, her widowed daughter-in-law and her two children, her son and his wife and two children; my wife’s late brother’s widow, her daughter and her husband and their three children, and her son and his wife and their two children, plus our two sons and their wives and five children.

I don’t know how they keep everything straight up there in Bakersfield. I do know that anyone who thinks the extended family is extinct should examine this one. Those who couldn’t come would have doubled the numbers.

They also had invited several friends of ours who have known us from the start, including Cliff Gill, who brought us together on a blind date in Bakersfield. Among these old friends were some who made no secret of the fact that they never believed any woman could go the distance with me. They seemed incredulous, but resigned.

Everything was according to custom. There was wine and beer and hors d’oeuvres and an al fresco dinner and champagne and cake. My wife and I cut the cake and posed for snapshots feeding it to each other, as tradition required.

Our granddaughter Adrianna had taken a large box of pictures from our house and put together an album that showed us through the years. How easy it is to forget what one was like. In the first few pages my youthful face showed all my traits: vanity, arrogance, bravado, naivete. How, indeed, could any woman have gone the distance?

Among our oldest friends was Charles Chappell, who was covering courts for the Bakersfield Californian when I began my career there as a sportswriter. After Pearl Harbor, when my wife and I were living in Honolulu, Chappell came through as an Army lieutenant on his way out to the South Pacific. Later, he was my city editor at the old Los Angeles Daily News.

Another old friend was Jerry Luboviski, a retired vice president of what was then the Union Oil Co. As editor of the Belmont High School Sentinel, he had been my first editor, when I was a cub. Years later he was my city editor at the San Diego Journal and later at the Daily News. To this day, Luboviski holds that, despite my faults, I show some promise.

Cliff Gill insisted on retelling the story of how he introduced us. He had told me she was both beautiful and bright, knowing I would settle for nothing less. I insisted on seeing her first. She worked in the high school library. We paid it a visit. I looked her over from a distance and was stricken. He had no trouble talking her into the arrangement, he said, because on campus my name was legend. I was a former editor and columnist for the junior college newspaper and was now a dashing sports reporter for the local daily. What girl’s inherent resistance wouldn’t fail her?

Our courtship was not elegant. Sometimes we ate with Gill and his girlfriend at a Chinese restaurant. On Wednesday nights she went with me to the wrestling matches, which I had to cover, at Steve Strelich’s Arena; on Friday nights she went with me to the boxing matches. She has hated boxing and wrestling ever since.

To tell the truth, so have I.