It was possible to date without dating. Karen and I had this kind of relationship from September through December of 1956, the beginning of my senior year (and her junior year) at Kent State. It began by our having coffee in the Hub, the on-campus gathering place, almost every day. Most of the time there were multiple fraternity brothers and sorority sisters crowded around the same small table. My drink back then was usually a double-double: coffee with two small containers of cream and two spoonfuls of sugar. Early evenings we might find one another in the Capt Brady.
These really weren’t dates. Karen did not want to date me; she continued to date her ongoing boyfriend, David. I spent late evenings and weekends either studying or hanging out with fraternity brothers at Rocky’s. On rare occasions we might have a semi-date, under the rubric of an academic event such as the play Ondine, a student production of a French romance between Hans, a knight-errant and Ondine, a water-sprite. We went to a few early evening movies, one of which I recall vividly: White Squaw which contained every American Indian-Western cliche ever created. (If it were available today, it would be among the top ten cult films.) However, Karen remained unavailable in the evenings set aside for David.
That arrangement lasted until Christmas. Somehow, during the break for the holidays, I had the courage to write a letter to her. It was a long missive addressed, as usual, to “Hi Stupid.” The style was as strange and non-comprehensive as the greeting. I felt more comfortable writing to her in what might be viewed as a “dialog.” Many lines appeared in quotation marks indicating my words to her and her replies to me! Although the form was a dialog, I did include information about what I was doing and how I had spent a family Christmas long ago with my maternal relatives on the farm. All of this was a prelude to asking her to go to the DU winter formal on January 4. For all I knew, David was still in the picture, and I wanted to give her an opportunity to modify that picture, if she so chose.
She did. Two days later I received a response, written in the same style I had used, in which she, at the end of the letter, agreed to go with me to the dance. I had an extremely happy Christmas. The day afterwards, I responded to her response. That letter turned into a triad! In addition to the normal narrative found in any letter, I continued to create a dialog between the two of us when, suddenly, a third person began to speak with us: it was my alter ego! Over the following years, when I wrote to her while attending Cornell, our correspondence often included a dialog between the two of us as well as commentary from her superego, “Kitten,” and mine, “Fritz.”
Although it might be apparent how Karen and Kitten were related, my nick name of Fritz came from a more drawn-out reference. During the mid-fifties, crewcut haircuts and crewcut sweaters were popular. I was inclined toward both. One of my humorous fraternity brothers thought I should be called “Fritz, the U-boat Captain,” a designation that endured for some of my other friends. And so, I continued to have the unlikely designation of “Fritz” among an intimate group of friends.
These introductory letters also preserved the pleasure Karen and I found in atrocious puns. I had bought myself a Christmas present of a new record player and, thus, pedaled round-and-round about Debussy’s Fêtes and verbed swimmingly through La Mer. I had also purchased some Sinatra, Crew Cuts, and Belafonte albums to balance the classics. I still have the letters, an alternative for the lack of journal notes, as well as CDs made from the original thirty-three and one-third vinyls purchased more than a half-century ago.