It’s odd how a simple arbitrary policy can affect someone’s life. Take a school practice, for example; In junior high when all the new sixth grade students from both our town’s elementary schools were thrown together, the three sections of the combined class contained a large number of students whose last names began with M, the usual break between Section B and Section C. But, because that assigned too many students to Section C, two of the M’s were assigned to my section which had always included G through L. We suddenly had Wilma Malone and Don Masters as classmates. There was little interaction between the three sections, and the closest friendships developed within the sections.
We soon assigned nicknames to the new arrivals. Don became The Duck (supposedly because his changing voice had a tendency to “quack” and Wilma was dubbed Willie. She was a bright student, had nice clothes and nice manners and, though seemingly shy at first, she soon made friends and was invited to all the birthday and slumber parties.
Willie was cute rather than pretty, and athletic. She had been enrolled in gymnastics classes for three years, a fact that endowed her with a certain glamour as well as an assumed destiny to be the star of the girls’ basketball and softball teams once we were in high school. There she also made the cheerleader squad and had roles in most of the school plays. It was no surprise to any of us that she was elected class president two years in a row and Homecoming Queen in our senior year. When most of us started dating at age 15 or 16, she dated several of the most popular boys, some of them seniors, while most other girls stuck with classmates of our own age.
After graduation, Willy disappeared from our lives for several years. There were assumptions that she had begun her college education at summer school, that she had been offered a basketball scholarship at a Big Ten school other than Iowa. There were exaggerated rumors that she was traveling abroad, or in training for the World Olympics. And there were whispers that she “had to marry” one of the older boys who’d enlisted in the Navy and was now living in California near his Naval base.
As we found out later, none of those was true. Willie had been a student at the University in Madison, Wisconsin where she lived with an older brother and his wife (both in graduate school), attended classes to become a pharmacist and worked part time in a department store. We found out all this after our 25-year class reunion when we decided to start a class newsletter to help us stay in touch with what classmates we could locate. Three of the women who had been closest to Willie managed to track her as far as Marshalltown. My cousin, who had become a pharmacist in Marshalltown, had never heard of her, so that information led nowhere.
Quite unexpectedly in 1982, I received a letter from Willie, asking to be put on the mailing list for the newsletter and filling in some, but not all, of the gaps in the years since our graduation in 1952. Willie had never finished her studies to become a pharmacist but had been married for nearly twenty years to a Texas rancher she had met during a trip to Colorado. Their life in Texas had proven to be one of virtual isolation from her friends and family. They had no children, and when she was suddenly widowed, she began a search to renew former attachments. Her brother and his wife had moved their family to Oregon and she joined them there for several years until their children had grown and scattered to new lives of their own. The empty-nesters began a new life of motor-home travels and Willie, alone again, launched another search. This time, her efforts produced an abundance of renewed friendships from our schooldays and she claims to have never felt more like she belonged. This tale serves to strengthen my belief that few people know us, understand and accept us as do those we grew up with. I have always advised my children and grandchildren to stay in touch with those long-time friends. You just never know when you might need someone who knew you in kindergarten.