Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Today is Linda’s birthday, every year making us the same age for the next two months and four days. She was born in St. Vincent’s hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. Her grandfather may have been the attending physician, I’m not sure. Dr. U.J.W. Peters, whom the family called “Doc’n” was an old fashioned physician in the day of housecalls and when people who couldn’t afford to pay the doctor brought a couple of chickens or a basket of vegetables. He died in 1944, during WW2, and Linda’s paternal grandmother lived until 1952.
Linda’s parents met while they were students at the University of Alabama and were married in Christ Episcopal Church, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, her mother’s home church and hometown. They settled in Birmingham, his home. He was in real estate, and as WW2 was ending they moved to Mobile for a real estate undertaking, then in 1947 on to Panama City for another. Linda was in Cove School and they were members of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. We started dating -- not so much “in high school” as after YPSL (Young People’s Service League), the Episcopal youth group meeting every Sunday evening -- in 1952. First dates consisted of Linda sitting beside me in the front seat of my family’s 1949 Plymouth woody station wagon loaded with nine high school students going for a ride after “League” then being taken home, Linda last.
Our first “formal” was the Bay High 1952 Christmas Ball. While Linda and her mother were fussing over her gown, and my mother was calling Lucile to find out what color the gown was, selecting and cutting the camellias and making a corsage, I was sitting in the front seat of the station wagon (we were triple dating with Philip & LaVerne and Eleanor & Mandeville) -- cars had bench seats in those days, not bucket seats -- practicing my movements so the first kiss would not be awkward, my fear being that I would kiss an eye or an ear instead of lips.
Linda went to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I went to UF in Gainesville. It takes a determined young man to keep track of a girl going to college nearly a thousand miles away, but I pulled it off, and here we are, 1952 to 2015, sixty-three years on. We were the first couple married in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida, and counting Lillian, our great-granddaughter, nine people have their lives because of us.