True Romance

Dear George, 

I went to the freshman mixer on the first day and joined a cluster of eight or nine new classmates who were chatting about politics.  I couldn’t believe how knowledgeable and sophisticated they were.  I think I was the only U.P. kid to ever attend Antioch College.  While standing there I spotted a girl in a white dress across the lawn.  A thin, pretty brunette.  She was very animated, flitting about, chatting with this person and that, and had a beautiful smile — bursting with enthusiasm and joy.  I was smitten on the spot and decided that this was the girl that I hoped to marry someday.  Weeks later I learned that her name was Katja Werrin.  While I saw her around campus now and then, I was much too shy to introduce myself, and my first year went by without my having a date with her or anyone else.  

  Our school had a coop system in which all students did jobs off campus, starting in their second year.  My first coop job was at a biological laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.  I was very lonely in Madison and decided to take a weekend trip to Milwaukee where two of my freshmen hallmates were working at a private mental hospital.  Much to my amazement, Katja Werrin, the girl I’d admired from afar at the mixer, was also there, living a block away from my friends and hanging out with them.  Though I’d never had the courage to speak to her, now chance circumstances had brought us together.  After a second visit I invited Katja to come to Madison to see the University of Wisconsin.  She did so, staying in a dorm with one of my high school friends.  So exciting.  On the first night we went to a campus bar, and I told Katja about wanting to marry her the first time I saw her.   She got very angry and said that was the worst line she had ever heard.  When I dropped her at the dorm we did kiss good night.  It was our first kiss,  Years later Katja told me it was that kiss that sealed the deal.  

  In ensuing weeks my mind was constantly in that agitated state that we know as mad love.  The end of the quarter arrived, and Katja accepted my invitation to come to my family’s home in  Menominee for spring break.  My father and my brother Steve picked us up by car in Madison.  We stopped for a Whitehouse sandwich for lunch, and it was so rich that it required rest room stops all the way home.   When we arrived at our house, Katja went immediately into the ladies room.  My mother, unable to contain her excitement, burst through the unlocked bathroom door to tell Katja that she was the first girl that I had ever brought home.  Katja was mortified, and I’m sure her first impression was that U.P. people were a strange lot.  The rest of our vacation went better.  We walked out on the river ice and saw a mud-puppy on the river bottom, then hiked on snowshoes to Brewery Park. Many of my parents’ friends came over, and Katja thought they were quite wonderful. 

  We returned to Antioch by streamliner and hung out together much of every day.  Katja was a pre-med major, and we took chemistry and physics together.  We were lab partners, but neither of us had much aptitude.  Katja was much more casual about precision in our experiments, while I was  much more rigid.  When we weren’t doing classes or homework, we went to the Little Art Theater to see Ingmar Bergmann or Fellini movies or drank 3.2 beer and chatted with proprietess Goldie at Com’s Tavern on High Street.  By the end of the year Katja had switched from the Pre-Med to French, and I had replaced Engineering with Literature.

  My coop job in my third year was at Popular Science magazine in New York City while Katja was living with her family in Philadelphia, working at Philadelphia Psychiatric.  We’d get together every couple of weeks, either in Philadelphia or New York.  One of my Antioch friends, Steve Schwerner, was a knowledgeable jazz buff, and Katja and I joined the outings that he organized to jazz clubs in and around Greenwich Village.  Thelonious Monk was our group’s  favorite.  One night at the Five Spot Cafe I was nodding to the music, tapping on the table with my knuckles, and I looked up to see Monk at his piano, watching me with a big grin on his face. 

My visits to Katja’s home in Philadelphia were less successful.  First of all, I was silent most of the time.  Second, Katja’s family was Jewish, and there was very strong pressure in the 1950’s for sons and daughters to find Jewish mates.  The final straw came when Katja’s parents offered me a glass of whiskey and I not only accepted it but helped myself to a second glass.  Before I knew what had happened, I was being driven to the bus station, banned for eternity.  Later I took the bus back to Philly and we met downtown, but it was freezing, and we were unhappy puppies wandering about in the cold.    

In our fourth year Katja did a year abroad, first in Besancon, France, and then in Vienna.  She was conscientious about corresponding about her continental adventures, but I was abysmal.  Katja returned to Philadelphia from Europe prior to our fifth and final year, and, deciding from my non-correspondence that I was no longer interested in her, she wrote me a Dear John letter, explaining that she had moved on.  Things weren’t any better when we met on campus.  I would say that the ensuing months were the most painful time of my life and probably hers as well.  Through some miracle too complicated to describe, we did finally manage to get back together.  We scheduled our wedding for August 28th, 1960, at the Quaker chapel on our college campus.  Our minister’s name was Howard Johnson.    

Katja’s parents had been more than dubious about our relationship.  However, they did drive to Yellow Springs from Philadelphia with Katja’s siblings, Ami and David, and they begrudgingly gave Katja fifty dollars for our wedding expenses, enough to rent the upstairs room in the student union for two hours and to buy a bouquet of flowers, a small cake, and one bottle of champagne for twenty guests.  We had purchased our wedding rings for nineteen dollars apiece, including the engraving, from a sidewalk vendor in nearby Dayton.  

My parents, my brothers Steven and Peter, and my sister Vicki drove down from the Upper Peninsula.  Katja’s father told my dad the night before the wedding that they opposed our marriage and were sure that we would wind up getting divorced.  My father took us aside that same night and said, in no uncertain terms, that Lundgrens never get divorced.  That was actually a helpful intervention since we never did consider divorce over the years, even in the rockiest times.   We honeymooned for one night in a downtown Dayton hotel that had seen better days and left the next day to begin graduate school in Ann Arbor.  One major phase of our life had come to an end, and a  brand new young married phase was about to begin. 

Love,

Dave