Love letters, even the most romantic ones, were no substitute for reality. Occasional long evenings on the beach, even the most romantic ones, were no substitute for reality. The summer between my senior year at Kent State and my first year at Cornell was no substitute for reality.
I wrote to Karen several times a week; she wrote more frequently and tried not to chide me too often about my own deficient schedule of responses. At least, they were very long letters when I did get to them. I found multiple pages written in the dark hours after midnight were very comforting to me. Somehow, during the daylight or the nightfall of early evening, I felt awkward about composing them. Or maybe it was because I slept a lot during the day. I did not have a summer job, since the Titanium Plant where I had once found statistical employment was in an economic slump. (During the one summer when I did not go back to Kent for classes, George Davies and I found employment for three months in the Niles Titanium Plant. We worked in their analytic office and did daily data entries of samples taken from the titanium sheets they produced. Certain, now unremembered, measurements were graphed to show that the product met specification. I spent that summer using an old-fashioned Monroe calculator to solve thousands of quadratic equations.)
During the summer of 1957, Karen did find a job as a counselor at Camp Wingfoot at North Madison, Ohio. It was on Lake Erie and only a two-hour drive from Niles. We tried to spend as many weekend evenings as we could on the nearby beach. It was a challenge driving back to Niles late at night when the wind coming through the open window was the only reason I could stay on the road. Driving with your eyes closed is not a good idea.
We did keep the letters and they have become part of our collections on paper, for her, and in electronic versions, retyped some ten years ago, for me. Comments on what we did, or in my case, failed to do, in our daily lives made up the content of many of them. This was also the time when I became enamored by sonnets created by both Wm. Shakespeare and E.B. Browning, many of which were copied into our letters. We also included items relating to potential wedding plans, especially those relevant to views held by a lapsed-Catholic-husband-to-be and Congregational-anti-Catholic-parents.
There were, in addition, four significant events I experienced during that Summer. I did get to meet Karen’s Mother and Father when I drove to Sandusky and spent a weekend with her family.
Secondly, we were, to some extent, affected by the June breakup between my fraternity brother, Dan, and Karen’s sorority sister, Lillian. They were the ones who had introduced the two of us a year ago. They had been “seriously” involved for several years previously and seemed to be destined for marriage. Karen and I vowed to be different.
The third event was a visit to Ithaca, New York with my dearest cousin, Rosemary, who had grown up with me and was virtually my own sister. She and I drove there in my new Ford so I could find a place to live the following September when I would begin my new life at Cornell.
There was also another pleasant trip for closing my life at Kent State. Bill and Frank, two of my DU brothers, drove with me to Middlebury, Vermont, for an international fraternity meeting at the College. It was my first trip to a New England campus and my introduction, albeit, in summer rather than in a magnificent fall, to the part of the country where I could live for the rest of my life. Fortunately, I did have the opportunity to experience New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts during the initial years of my academic life.
This New England trip was also the time I was first exposed to lobster. Frank, who became an outstanding chef and owner of a restaurant in Akron, Ohio, led us on a merry prank of our non-New England brothers. He assured every Midwesterner that lobster tails tasted terrible, but the three of us would take theirs and consume them so the brothers from Middlebury College would not be upset by all those visitors who would, otherwise, have left them, uneaten, on their plates. It was not an “easy living summer” but my addiction to red crustaceans did result from it.