"Care to dance?" asks Grandpa Jim

I’d like to tell you the story of a “miracle of memory.”

I call it a miracle, because I have always thought that my memory for names and faces has been below average. The aging process has not helped what was flawed, and has only made it worse, I keep thinking.

It was early spring, 1946. I was 19, just back from the Pacific, and a little depressed, because I still faced two more years in the navy. I had enlisted for four years on my 17th birthday and (A) thought the war would be longer, and (B) received a “perk” by getting to choose my boot camp location. I chose Great Lakes, about 35 miles from home.

A shipmate and I decided to attend a San Diego dance palace called the Mission Beach Ballroom. It was a huge building with two stages, as I recall. Young people went there to dance to the “Big Bands” of that time…and there were dozens. We spotted two girls and asked them to dance. My choice was a freckle-faced redhead named Jean. My buddy’s choice was a brown-haired girl named Marilyn. We ended up dancing quite a few numbers with these girls and asked to take them home. Turns out they were in a group that included Marilyn’s mother, aunt, and their escorts, who were also sailors. The older women did not give their permission to me, but did grant it to my shipmate. (I believe that they didn’t want to take the responsibility for Jean, who was their guest.)

My buddy said he’d get the vital phone numbers and addresses and went with the group to catch a bus. I went back to the ship. Soon, and I mean TOO SOON, my so-called pal turned up on the ship. Seems that he and Marilyn had had a little “tiff” and he got off the bus without the vital data he was supposed to get. How am I ever supposed to find “my Jean?” “That’s easy,” I figured, “I’ll just go back to that ballroom and look for her.”

So, I began to “haunt” the place. Yes, I was a little obsessed, I guess, but I had met the girl next door, the girl of my dreams, my one and only, I felt. (She was, by the way, from Elmhurst, Illinois, just a few miles east of Wheaton, where I had lived.) Meeting such a neighbor so far from home was a strong plus. For the first two or three weekends, I paid to go in and look and wait for Jean. I May have danced a couple of numbers, but I just kept thinking about finding HER!

Then, it dawned on me. Why continue to spend precious dollars when I could just as well wait outside for her to show up? For the next three or four weekends, my confidence sure did sink lower and lower. Had they (the group) found another ballroom? (There were a couple of others….one I recall was the Aragon.) And then it happened. Not at the ballroom, not in Mission Beach, but in downtown San Diego.

I was walking past a movie theatre on a sunny Saturday when the movie let out and several hundred people flooded out of the doors. Most of them were sailors, in uniform, which was still required. One of them looked familiar. Could it be a shipmate that I just didn’t know too well? Or somebody I had once met? Like an ESCORT? LIKE AT MISSION BEACH?

I approached the man and asked him if we had met at the dance hall with a group that included a Marilyn, a Jean, etc? He said, yes, we had. He gave me the phone number of Marilyn’s mother. I called her, and was invited to her house where Jean would be that Friday night, and we will have been married 61 years on the 17th of this month. To have picked out that face in a sea of sailor’s faces (so to speak) was a miracle granted to this lonely veteran, far from home, and with a weak memory.

Another guardian angel?