What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [42]
World War II soon interrupted those studies. Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, Robby enlisted in the army. He was kept in the States as a training sergeant until shortly after Allied troops stormed Normandy in 1944. After a few weeks in Brittany, he was on a train transporting the 29th Division north, to chase the German army out of Holland, when Robby had one of the most pivotal and romantic moments of his life.
When the train stopped at a station in Rennes, France, Robby—who was in charge of a few of the cars—decided on a whim to duck into the station waiting room. There, he saw a petite, sultry, and curvaceous woman working behind the counter whose name, he learned, was Fernande Allaurant. She was a champion gymnast whom friends called Bijou. Using his two years of high school French, Robby quickly struck up a conversation with her, exchanged names and addresses, and, as in some classic wartime movie, reboarded the train, headed to fierce combat in the Western Front, but ecstatically happy. He kept up a constant correspondence with Bijou during months of fighting in Holland, Belgium, Germany, and France, including the Battle of the Bulge, and in Germany after the armistice was signed on May 8, 1945.
After Robby inveigled his way into a French language and civilization course at the Sorbonne in Paris, the two got even better acquainted. He returned to New York in February 1946. And with the promise of a job at BBD&O after he had a bachelor’s degree, he took advantage of the G.I Bill and enrolled at Hofstra University on Long Island. Though he had spent a total of only eighteen days with her, he also wrote to Bijou to propose. He instructed her that a one-word response would suffice. “I waited on tenterhooks,” he said, transported by the memory. “And suddenly, it came—a telegram with one word: Oui!”
Three years later, after graduating from Hofstra as a psychology major, he returned to BBD&O and began doing consumer research, until it “dawned on me that my interest in life wasn’t to get people to buy a particular product like Lucky Strikes cigarettes.” Unsure of what to do next, he hearkened back to a boyhood love of scouting and applied for a job as a district Boy Scout executive, recruiting scoutmasters and establishing troops. Over the next thirteen years, he headed several district councils throughout New York State and New Jersey before becoming the public relations director for the five Boy Scout councils of New York City. He then took a job doing public relations for the East Islip school district, headquartered a mile from the house in which he grew up.
His career hit a roadblock in 1966 when his marriage to Bijou fell apart too publicly for a school official in a small community. Though the head of the school board would later serve as a character witness on Robby’s behalf in divorce and custody proceedings over the couple’s two sons, Robby chose to resign from his position. He went to work instead for the now-defunct Long Island Advance, where he became a prize-winning reporter. He returned to public relations in 1968, working first for the New York City Board of Education and then running a prototype of an open-circuit TV experiment to teach courses at the City University of New York.
As his marriage to Bijou was ending, Robby ventured to build a new life for himself by returning to an old haunt, Roseland Ballroom on West Fifty-second Street in New York. He had learned to dance there before World War II when he first worked in New York as a teenager. He had taken a few dance lessons and discovered an aptitude for the fox-trot, rumba, jitterbug, and waltz—and for picking up