June 29, 1957

Linda and I were married 55 years ago today, June 29, 1957, the first wedding at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church. Officiating was the Reverend David R. Damon. Some years later David and Olive accepted a call to a parish in Jacksonville, but he began with us at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, as an engineer at the Navy base, going to Sewanee from there, and returning to Panama City after ordination. 

Graduated from the University of Florida a few weeks earlier, I had already been sworn into the Navy as an Officer Candidate Seaman Apprentice and, a week after our wedding, headed off from Panama City airport to Officer Candidate School, Newport, Rhode Island, a four month school leading to commissioning as Ensign, USNR. Life at a Navy school was interesting and different, living in a dormitory of four-man rooms, with great camaraderie among the young men in Charlie Company. All of us were 21 years old and graduated from college within the past month, me with the deep, strong southern drawl of which I was totally unaware until the laughing began, the only OC from the South. Never having lived beyond Florida, Newport in July was, to me, like living in a windy refrigerator. Years later we returned to the Naval War College in Newport, and the refrigerator door was still open. 

Father Damon had grown up in nearby Kingston, RI, where his father had been a professor at the University of Rhode Island. He still owned the family home there. The first floor was rented, but the second floor had been converted into a comfortable apartment, complete with kitchen and an old electric range on which three of the four solid cast iron burners still worked. Late August 1957, Fr. Damon arranged for Linda and me to have the upstairs of his Kingston house, and my brother Walt and his friend Mike drove Linda from Panama City up to Rhode Island for our first home. As they drove through New York City, our 1948 Dodge had an electrical problem halfway across the George Washington Bridge during rush hour traffic, and Walt and Mike pushed the Dodge the rest of the way across. But they managed to arrive safely in due course in Rhode Island. 

Liberty Call at OCS was every Saturday morning to Sunday evening. I rushed to the ferry landing, rode the ferry across Narragansett Bay to Jamestown, where Linda and the green Dodge always were waiting for me at the ferry landing. 

Then across the island to the incredibly high, narrow, steep, scary two-lane Old Jamestown Bridge, home to Kingston and exploration of Rhode Island, clams and lobster.

During the pre-commissioning physical examination, Navy physicians detected my heart murmur and, instead of allowing me to be commissioned after graduation, sent me to the U. S. Naval Hospital, Newport, for a month of extensive tests and evaluation. New England winter was coming on, it was too far to commute daily between Kingston and Newport, and Father Damon to the rescue again, found an old family friend in downtown Newport with a room to rent in her home. We lived there, 42 Rhode Island Avenue. 

My "first snow" was waking up there on a frosty December 1957 morning and hearing absolute, total silence outside until a car crunched by in the fresh white snow. I opened the window, scooped up a handful of snow from the porch roof, and turned around toward Linda still half asleep in bed, armed with my first snowball. 

The middle of December Navy cardiologists cleared me medically and I was commissioned Ensign, USNR. We loaded up the Dodge and headed home on Navy leave for Christmas in Panama City, with news for prospective grandparents.


Malinda was born June 25, 1958, baptized at Holy Nativity by Father Damon, with David as her godfather.

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