Victory—a matter of staying power.
—Elbert Hubbard
A great many people thought that the first Cotton Ball was where he met my mother, but it wasn’t. He met her earlier on a blind date.
My mother attended Peace and Meredith Colleges in Raleigh. My father first met her shortly after he graduated, while she was still a junior at Meredith. She was three years younger than he was. They met on a double blind date set up by her cousin—and my father was not intended to be her date. Yet somehow, my mother recalled, people got switched around, and he ended up in the backseat of the car with her. I suspect he had planned it that way all along.
My mother said she didn’t really care for him from the start. She had seen him before the date as a student standing on the corner near her house, wearing a baseball cap and hitchhiking to school. I’m sure he had also seen her and had prevailed on her cousin to set things up with the girl he wanted to meet. Although this beautiful and effervescent young woman from Raleigh may have been a social level or two above him, he had already set his sights on her and began his courtship in earnest.
My mother loved to dance, and on their first date, she found out he couldn’t. That was one negative. He wanted to sit out the entire dance in a secluded part of the combination basketball court and auditorium that had temporarily been converted into a ballroom, drinking Cokes and talking. My mother felt he was full of himself and quite pushy. Two more negatives. In fact, she said he told her on this first date that he intended to marry her.
He even embarrassed her when he was master of ceremonies at a dance she later attended, this time with another date. My father was with a woman who enjoyed drinking, and he had evidently enjoyed drinking along with her. My mother said he fell off the stage and landed flat on his face at one point while trying to introduce the next piece the band was preparing to play.
With all those negatives, he had to outfox his competitors, and he made a point of finding out who they were. Meredith was just down Hillsborough Street from NC State and its all-girl enrollment was an obvious target for the men at State, particularly the fraternity boys. Since my father had a car, one of his tricks, when he found out who the others were she was dating, was to pull up in front of their fraternities with her in the car and tell her that he had to run in and see somebody.
My mother said she wanted to crouch down on the floorboards until he came out of each house, and she suspected there was no one in there he needed to see, or even knew. But leaving her in his car in full view of the fraternity brothers on the porch each time was a clever way of staking his claim.
“Boy was he persistent,” my mother remembered. He combined his strategy of eliminating his competition with a keen anticipation of what my mother liked and wanted. He showered her with baby chicks dyed purple and rabbits at Easter, and on special occasions, with other live creatures he knew she loved. He bought a Pomeranian for one of her birthdays and prevailed on his secretary to store it in her bathtub for the week before the date arrived. The secretary told my mother she couldn’t sleep the entire period with the dog yipping in the bathtub, but my father had charmed her into it.
After my mother graduated from college, he continued his relentless pursuit, turning everyone who knew her into a sup
porter. She said her grandparents’ cook and yardman loved him and told her what a dynamic go-getter he was. One could almost believe he paid them off. So using one strategy or another, he drove all other suitors away, and I think by default she accepted his proposal of marriage. His persistence won out and on October 3, 1936, they were married.
My mother was an only child, whereas my father had a brother and two sisters. As the saying goes, single children tend to be spoiled. My father certainly spoiled, or at least indulged, my mother not only during their courtship, but throughout their life together.
What other man would accept, after marriage, both his motherin-law’s and her mother’s moving with him to another town, then living under the same roof in a small apartment? This may have been another reason he became a life-long workaholic—anything to get out of the house.
After I was born in 1938 and was barely old enough to start talking, I named my parents by mutual consent. My grandmother, Mildred Goodwin Dent, was trying to teach me to say “Daddy,” and it came out “Dottie.” But I could pronounce “Pops,” so my father became Pops, and my mother became Dottie, which was close enough to Dorothy for her. She preferred that to “Mom,” anyway, so the name took, and my father preferred “Pops” to Dad. My grandmother, by the way, became “Mimmie,” as close as I could come to Mildred. Thus our communication links were established.