For Kitty and Johnny, It’s Time
There are promises, and there are promises.
Fifteen years ago, Johnny Trueblood made one of the former--or was it one of the latter?--to Kitty Thurman.
He can’t remember which restaurant they were at when he made the promise, or just how he framed it.
But since then, the idea has lingered silently in the air between them, like an unseen hourglass.
If we’re still together when I turn 60, Trueblood vowed, I’ll marry you.
His luck with the institution of marriage hadn’t been wonderful. He had been divorced twice. A third time, he tried to get a divorce, but it turned out he hadn’t been legally married in the first place; the minister, he says, forgot to deliver the license to county officials.
“Four years later, it was still sitting on his dashboard, all coffee-stained,” Trueblood said.
When a clerk at the county gave Trueblood the news, he reacted like the musician he was, a veteran of groups like The Untouchables, The Rejects, The Devils of Country Music and Trueblood’s Blues Band: “What do you mean we didn’t get married?” he fumed. “Of course we got married! We had a band!”
This thing between Johnny and Kitty hasn’t been what you’d call a whirlwind courtship.
They met in 1962. She and her sister couldn’t help but notice the young guy in the next booth.
“What’s that you’re eating?” they asked.
“French fries with brown gravy,” the Carolina-bred Johnny Trueblood replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
So it wasn’t a marriage made in culinary heaven.
In fact, it wasn’t a marriage at all.
Johnny and Kitty didn’t get together until 1979. By then, both had been through their share of blasted relationships. Between the two of them, they had 10 children. Today, 16 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren have been added to the brood.
For years, the couple lived in a back room of Trueblood’s Collectibles, a cavernous curio superstore in downtown Ventura. In the morning, Johnny would take his 1937 Ford panel truck out to auctions, yard sales, streets with trash cans overflowing. Later, he’d return with sets of rusty wrenches, brass elephants, cow skulls, antique cigarette lighters, World War I medals tossed from an old man’s final home.
Today, Trueblood’s is a landmark of sorts, its narrow aisles and display cases piled high with beer signs, yellowed magazines, Boy Scout knives, watch crystals, washboards, matchbooks, bottle caps, piano innards, you name it. Small Trueblood grandchildren play amid the stacks. A parrot, a cockatiel and two turtle doves roost in cages, a monitor lizard sits inert in its glass terrarium, and a Siamese cat hides in the labyrinth.
Over the years, Kitty started worrying.
“What if something happens to Johnny?” she thought. “What would I do with all this stuff? If we were married, I’d at least have some control over it.”
Her family also was worried: You should get married, they urged, on a regular basis.
Recalling his previous failures, Trueblood was reluctant. That’s why he chose as his nuptial landmark the impossibly distant age of 60.
Last May 30, he turned 59 and Kitty reminded him of the timeworn promise.
“He said, ‘Why are you thinking about that now?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘It’s too soon.’ ”
That didn’t hold her back. She booked a wedding chapel in Ventura and a community center in Casitas Springs for June 1, 2001--the day after Johnny’s 60th birthday. She settled on a Southern belle wedding dress, complete with floppy hat and parasol. He’s looking for the kind of suit that would have been at home on Clark Gable in “Gone With the Wind.”
On Friday, Johnny and Kitty drove to the County Government Center for their marriage license. They were a day early--license applications must be filed no more than 90 days before the wedding--but first thing next week, they’ll try it again.
More than 250 people from throughout the U.S. are expected for the affair. Many will bring their own special dishes for the reception, which will be a gigantic potluck. Every musician of a certain age in Ventura County will be there, and Johnny Trueblood himself will be prevailed upon to do his trademark wild-man’s version of “Mustang Sally.”
Will the long-delayed marriage change their relationship?
“Hope not,” said Trueblood, beaming at his bride-to-be.
Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com or at 653-7561.
