When Sally Meets Harry --No, I mean when Myrtle meets Howard

Sally meets Harry – no I mean Myrtle meets Howard

Upon graduation from high school, I worked for a year for Laclede Gas Company in downtown St. Louis. It was a long bus ride from the far western edge of University City, where my parents and I lived..  I started out as a temporary clerk and did various things, such as run an addressograph for a special project.  It had recently been discovered that you can store natural gas in caves, and there were many in the St. Louis era.  The Gas Company had developed it’s first natural gas clothes dryer, and were mailing postcards advertising it to all its customers.  Whoever had designed the cards had not taken into account that they were slick and would not go through the addressograph machine.  The engineers were called in, and we finally figured out that if you put talcum powder on them, they would go through.  After working there 6 months, I was told that to stay on, I had to bid on a job, as it was a union shop.  The only opening was as a key punch operator in the billing office, so I bid on it, got the job, and spent two weeks in BM school learning how to key punch.  As it was a union shop, the union required that there be more people on the floor than they had key punch machines, so I and two other women spent most of our days doing things by hand that the machines could do in quick time.  Once a week we got to do the actual billing so we wouldn’t forget how to do it. 

By that summer, I realized I was bored, and that probably it was time for me to go to college.  I applied at the University of Missouri, and was accepted for the Fall Term.  Aunt Sadie suggested that I go with her and cousin Marcia to Miami Beach for the summer, I accepted her invitation.  Grammie went with us and was with us for the first two weeks.  We stayed in a small modest hotel on the beach.  The manager of the hotel had a son, who he fixed me up on a date with.   We went out on a few dates, and when he asked me to marry him, I got scared.  I knew it was awfully fast, though I liked him, I didn’t love him.  I decided to go home, and by myself, I boarded the train and 19 hours later was in St.Louis.  (Today, I can’t even remember the young man’s  name.) 

Parents, those days, did not know how important it was to acquaint a student ahead of time with the college they are going to go to, so I had never been to Columbia (where the University was located, nor was I really ready to go.  I had run into some of my high school friends, while in Florida, and all they talked about was boys, sororities, and little about school.  I was the one, who in high school, joined a sorority, and after a week de pledged it as I thought the initiation pranks were degrading.  Many of my friends followed suit and were proud of me doing so.  It seemed so silly what they were having us do. 

I started getting cold feet about going to college, and told my parents.  My dad said, “If you are not going, maybe you need to look for another job.”  I applied for four different jobs,, and they all offered me one.  I chose to go to work for the City of University City as a clerk in the Finance Department.  We previously had lived about 4 blocks from City Hall and I had gone to elementary school just across the street from City Hall. It was only a very short bus ride to it.  University City Hall is octagon shape, five floors high, but each floor is two stories high, and it was built in the early 1900’s it was elegant.  Concrete lions grace the entrance.  As a child I loved to climb on them.  The building was originally built about as a bank, so there are vaults throughout the building and were now used as closets.  The first floor is the public area, with the tax office on one side, accounting, and finance sharing other offices.  Mrs. Hughes, the telephone operator, had a  small stall, from which she was able to greet and direct people to where they were going.  The stall was just big enough for her chair, and for the old fashioned switch board  with 8 lines coming in and about 12 lines to connect to, which she operated.  I was to be her relief, two 15 minute breaks and lunch hour. There was an elegant spiral staircase that led to the second floor, where the City Manager’s office was.

The job required me to do the mimeographing, run the spirit duplicator, run the postage machine, and type financial reports on stencils on a long carriage typewriter (definitely not electric).  I had fudged a little on my qualifications, but I was a fast learner.  Later they trained me to do payroll and pay bills on what at that time was a type of first generation accounting machine.

Howard was an administrative intern in the City Manager’s Office, and was finishing up his Master’s Degree in Public Administration. Luckily he was not at City Hall the day I was interviewed, as I have a feeling he would never have invited me on a date.

Our first meeting was in the dungeon of the basement, where the mimeograph machine was located.  I had never operated one previously, though I had seen one in operation.  Howard came down stairs, and asked me to run something off on card stock.  I had to immediately go upstairs and ask someone how to do that.  Turns out the machine was not capable of doing that, so I had to go up to the second floor and find Howard’s office and tell him .   Howard was only 23 years old at the time, but appeared older. I was only 18—soon to be 19.  I also did not realize at that time that I was being paid more than he was.  I really thought he was far more important than he actually was.

A week or so later, I was walking through the underground passage from City Hall to the Public Library. Howard was also walking to the library.  Turns out we both had a love of reading.  We got to talking and he invited me to go on a date.  I wasn’t sure how Grammie and Pop were going to accept my going out with a gentile, as I had only dated Jewish boys.  One date should be okay.  Howard picked me up, and suggested we go out to a bar.  Being underage, I did not feel comfortable going to one.  Pop had taught me how to drink, when I started dating.  He suggested ordering a Tom Collins, as it was a very tall drink, and you could nurse it all night.  I never really liked them.  When Howard realized I would not be comfortable going to a bar,  he suggested a movie.  We went to the Varsity Theater.  It was located on Delmar and Leland Avenue.  I had lived on Leland from the time I was 6 till I was about 16 years old.  Merilyn and I had spent every Friday night there.  Howard and I walked in the theater, and Howard did not pay.  I wondered if this was a fringe benefit of city employment that I did not know about.  No such luck.  Howard worked there every Friday and Saturday night as a “bouncer”.  The picture showing that night was “Father of the Bride” with Spencer Tracy.  Many of our future dates were on Friday or Saturday night, and Howard would work, and I would sit in the very last row.  He would come sit by me and sneak a kiss or two between having to walk up and down the aisles and remind kids to get their feet off the back of chairs, that they were too noisy or other bad  behavior.

When Howard took me home that night, I knew that if we ever went out again, he would be the one for me.  It was not until about the sixth date or even later that he got around to kissing me. I kept telling my parents that this was just a platonic relationship, but when Howard started bringing me home after work, taking me out more often, they realized things were getting serious.  They were most accepting of the difference in religion, as were Howard’s when I finally got to meet them many months later.

We hadn’t been going out very long, when the young man from Miami Beach showed up.  It was not very easy to tell him, sorry, but I don’t love you, and I had found someone else.

Many nights when we went out on Saturday night, Howard brought me home early—by midnight.  Sunday afternoon he would call about two, and say he just got up.  How could he sleep that long?  Turned out he would go by the police station and ride with them all night so that he could learn more about police work, and the city. 

By Valentine’s Day, I think Howard realized that he might be in love with me. I was home with the flu, running a fever, snotty nose, flannel pj’s, and feeling like crap.  He showed up at my parents small apartment with a gift—“The New Yorker 25^th Anniversary Album” a collection of it’s most popular cartoons.  He wrote in ii “To Myrtle from Howard with love, Valentine’s Day,1954”.  For many years,, we had two copies of it, as he had one for himself as well.

It was not until summer that Howard actually got around to asking me to marry him.  And, the story continues – for the next 62 years.