On my first date, we sat at my house. The boy came in.  We sat at home in the living room.  My mother and father sat on the front porch.  And that was it.

I met a kid that lived in the boarding house up the street that worked construction on the roads around the area.  He had a car so he would take me back and forth to work and pick me up.  His name was Jack Lively.  He’d take me back and forth and then we’d go to the beaches at Virginia Beach and South Carolina to Myrtle Beach and Carolina Beach; we traveled all over.  I mean, he took us all over.  He broke his arm on the construction crew so he was being paid but he was not working.  He had lots of time so he could travel all over.  He was always up at the house to stay with me or sit with me.  Mother and Father didn’t care too much for him, but they didn’t say anything.  He would come in and we’d sit in the living room on the davenport, or we’d go wherever we were going and come back.  When that clock chimed 11PM, I’d better be in the house.  If I was late, we knew we weren’t going to get to go the next time we wanted to go.  We got to where we knew this so we’d go and if we were going to be late, we just didn’t worry about it and we’d stay late, because we knew the next night we had to stay in.  We went out together for about five months.

After Western Union moved me out to Los Angeles, I stayed with the other girls at the Emory Inn.  The first floor had people that had been there for a long while, and the second floor was all girls, with the top floor all boys. It was real nice when we moved in there because we could meet people and be friends with other people, other boys, without feeling like you were in trouble. The first night I moved in, Bill came over and wanted to know if he could sit at the table with us.  Marilis said, “Sure.  Sit down.”  We talked for a while and then at breakfast he was at the same table again.

From then on, he didn’t give me any free time.  He took me to work, he brought me home, he took us on trips all around Southern California.  He had a car.  It was a beat up old car, but he had a car, and he took us all over.  We went to Lake Arrowhead and we went to Palm Springs.  I can’t think of the other places, but we traveled all over down there.  The war was going on by then.  Anyway, he just didn’t give up.  He said we were spending so much time together, why not get married and he gave me a ring and asked me to marry him.  We were in the car on the way home, and I says, “I’ll have to think about it.”  Anyway, I told him yes.   By the time we got married, there were a bunch of girls that were living at the Emory Inn that were from Raleigh.  There was a bunch more living in a hotel across the road.  So there were quite a few of us from our hometown.  So when we decided to get married, Bill went down and made arrangements at the Methodist church.  That was the same church where Shirley Temple got married.  Camilla Watkins was my Maid of Honor or bridesmaid.   A boy from the house named Griffin was the best man.  We got married and went back to the house, and when we got back to the house, back to the Emory Inn, Jean and Bob Overstreet were there.  Jean was Bill’s sister.  They had only been married for a couple of months too. They could have gone to the wedding had we known they were in town, but we didn’t know it.

My parents didn’t want to come to the wedding.  They didn’t approve.  My parents didn’t know Bill.  They wanted me to come home first and I said no.  I was on my own and I didn’t need their permission. 

I was very independent.  When I left home, I looked after me and I looked after the other kids at the Inn too.  If they wanted something, they’d always come to me to get it because I had stuff that they didn’t have.  I even had an ironing board and irons out here and nobody else had them.

When we got married, I had five hundred dollars in the bank, and Bill(Strauss) managed to go through it all real fast.

After we got married.  We used to go out to nightclubs.  I met Lawrence Welk at one of them.  We went to the pier where he played when he first came out to California.  He left that and went to the Palladium and we went to the Palladium several times.  We used to go dancing almost every weekend.

They were mainly dance halls.  They didn’t have people that performed like they do nowadays, not at the ones we went to.  They had music and we danced.  One of them was between Santa Ana and Long Beach.  Most of them had one or two people playing or they had jukeboxes.

We had our first child, Becky, in 1945 when we were living in the apartment in Englewood.  Bill’s mom and dad and his sister, Lucky, all came up to help take care of the baby and me.  At the time I was in the hospital for seven days before I was released.  It was kind of hard and they finally took her with forceps.  It took awhile for me to recover and they kept you longer back then.  We lived in Englewood, and then we bought a house out in Gardenia, moved to Torrance, then to Santa Ana.  Bill was working for the aircraft company, Northrop Aircraft.

Bill always took a lot of classes on the side and got a little more qualified for each job.  At one point, they went through some cut backs at Northrup and he got impacted.  He joined several companies and we moved to try and live closer each time so we moved a few times.  One was a pharmaceutical company that made aspirin.  He had some stock in it for awhile.  He was the head person that maintained the business machines for Orange County. 

Inbetween there, we tried to start a candy store, Candyland, and we had a booth at the Orange County Fair each year.  We sold chocolate frozen bananas and candy.  We never made much money at it so he went back to work of for the county after that.  Around then, he started drinking too much, heavier and heavier.  It got him fired a few times.  He always drank but it got the worst when he joined the Kiwani’s Club in Orange County.  He was having trouble at work and he got a chance to apply for work with the State of California up in Sacramento.  He got the job and went to work for the State as a systems analyst.

We went on to have Guy in 1949, Pam in 1953, and Phillip in 1959.  I have 11 grand children and 4 great grand children.