Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [30]
“Which do you want?” they asked.
And Dorothy Jo and I said in unison, “We want the money.”
We got on the train and headed to St. Louis. I had a hotel reservation in that city, and when we arrived, we went through the yellow pages, found a minister, and went to his home to be married. A friend of mine, a pilot named Howard Hessick, lived just outside St. Louis. He had also gotten married. So he and his wife came and stood up with us at our wedding. It was January 12, 1945, and Dorothy Jo wore a red dress. I still have it. She looked great, and both of us were ecstatically happy.
A coincidence of some magnitude regarding that minister occurred five years later. In 1950, Dorothy Jo and I moved out to Hollywood. We had an apartment on Las Palmas, just below Hollywood Boulevard, and we wanted to go to church one Sunday. We walked up to this Methodist church at the corner of Highland and Franklin, and there was the minister who had married us five years earlier. We were amazed. I’m not sure he remembered us; there were so many young couples who had quick and modest weddings during World War II.
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After we were married, I was stationed in DeLand, Florida, and Dorothy Jo loved it there. We both loved the climate and the sunshine. It was just one of our many shared enjoyments. It was in Florida that Dorothy Jo and I began one of our rituals that would last the entire duration of our thirty-seven years of marriage. It was always difficult to find a place to live during World War II, and when we first went to DeLand, we lived at a hotel. We ate in the singularly unromantic hotel dining room or, worse, in a restaurant. Do not ask me how, but as I might have expected, Dorothy Jo quickly found a charming place for us to live—a three-room apartment in a house—and we moved immediately. I was at the base flying all day, and when I returned, Dorothy Jo had cooked her first meal for us as husband and wife and was all prepared to serve. She brought out a candle and turned out the lights before she called me to dinner. We ate our first home-cooked meal together as man and wife, and it was dinner by candlelight. I remember that dinner vividly—and her face in the candlelight.
As wonderful and romantic as it turned out to be, there was a practical reason she had arranged the candlelight. In addition to cooking dinner, she had also baked an apple pie. The pie was delicious, but the oven was an old one, and for some reason it had made parts of the pie look very black and burned. It was not a burned pie, but it looked burned in a few places, and Dorothy Jo had used the candlelight so I would not see the color of the pie. And that’s how our candlelight ritual was born. From that day forward, whenever we were at home dining together, we would dine by candlelight. And that prevailed for thirty-seven years. Even if we just had a sandwich and a bottle of beer, we had it by candlelight.
When I got out of the navy, Dorothy Jo and I went back to Springfield so that I could finish my last two years of college. She promptly got a job teaching biology at Central High School, and almost as promptly she had the reputation of being one of the most, if not the most, popular teacher in the school.
Dorothy Jo was just twenty-one when she became a teacher. She was so young and pretty she looked more like a student than a teacher. Sometimes I would go by the high school to pick her up at the end of the day, and as she walked among the students out to the car, I would think how lucky I was to have her as my wife.
After I got enrolled at Drury, I set about getting a job myself. At first I thought I might try to get a job as a flight instructor at the local airport—all naval aviators qualified as flight instructors upon discharge—but I had no