A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Read online

  Sandra Jonas Publishing

  PO Box 20892

  Boulder, CO 80308

  sandrajonaspublishing.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Terry Marshall and Ann Garretson Marshall

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover illustration: Adobe Stock/Fresh Stock

  Book and cover design: Sandra Jonas

  Maps: Cynthia Carbajal

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Marshall, Terry, author. | Marshall, Ann Garretson, author.

  Title: A Rendezvous to Remember : A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties / Terry Marshall and Ann Garretson Marshall.

  Description: Boulder, Colorado : Sandra Jonas Publishing, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020944339 | ISBN 9781733338622 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781733338653 (paperback) | ISBN 9781733338677 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Marshall, Ann Garretson. | Marshall, Terry. | Political activists—Biography. | Man-woman relationships. | Nineteen sixties. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Social activists

  Classification: LCC CT275 .M377 2021 | DDC 973.92092 — dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020944339

  All photographs courtesy of the authors.

  v1.1

  To Jack Sigg,

  who profoundly influenced both our lives

  Contents

  1. Goodbye, Boulder

  2. Hungry Lions, Circling

  3. Castles in the Air

  4. A Peek into the Cold War

  5. Alone

  6. Le Grand Tour

  7. Postmark Silverton

  8. Bumps on the Way to Saint-Tropez

  9. On the Road Again

  10. Flirting with the Past

  11. Old Haunts, New Confrontations

  12. Politics East and West

  13. Farewell to Our Sting Ray Summer

  14. High-Stakes Gambling

  15. Last Act in London

  16. Bombshell in Johnstown

  17. Conundrum in Colorado

  18. Great Expectations

  19. A Decision at Last

  20. The Dreaded M-Word

  21. Land Mines on the Road to Silverton

  22. Rodeo Weekend

  23. From Joy to Pain

  24. Echoes of Vietnam

  25. Epilogue: Dare We Relive History?

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Memory and Sources

  Photo Album

  Maps

  About the Authors

  1

  Goodbye, Boulder

  Terry

  Thursday, 4 June 1964, Boulder, Colorado. In the final hours before Annie left for Europe, I was her faithful domestique. Grabbing up pages of her final term paper in progress, I raced by bicycle from her dorm, pumped uphill to her professor’s office, deposited her prose, and flew back for another installment, and then another. Three trips in all. We met the noon deadline by minutes.

  No lunch. Instead, I lugged her stuff out and arrayed it all on the sidewalk like a garage sale: garment bags, sacks of whatnots, boxes of books, boots, and shoes, a battered Smith-Corona portable typewriter, the AM/FM radio I gave her for graduation, bundles of letters tucked into their envelopes—all postmarked APO, all from her lieutenant waiting in Germany—as well as a carton of top secret reel-to-reel audiotape musings from the same guy.

  I wedged the whole mess into her mother’s Oldsmobile, as expertly as if I were a Machu Picchu stone mason. I couldn’t have squeezed in so much as a toothpick.

  We were left with a three-foot-high pile of Denver Post newspapers, months’ worth that Annie hadn’t read. “I’ll read them in Albuquerque,” she said. “I paid for them.” She scrounged up rope and bundled them to the roof of the car. “No biggie. It’s like strapping on gear for a campout.”

  But for a five-hundred-mile trip at sixty-five miles an hour? I simply shook my head.

  “Goodbye, Ter.” Her hand grazed my arm. No hug. No kiss. No tears. Certainly not with Mother Garretson beside her, pretending not to monitor our every move.

  “Have a great trip,” I managed to say.

  As they drove away, I slumped onto the steps of Hallett Hall. The first newspaper fluttered free as they passed the planetarium, well before they hit the Denver-Boulder Turnpike.

  We had created lots of memories here, Annie and I, all over campus, all over Boulder: those fifteen-cent burgers (for Annie, ketchup only), ten-cent fries, and spirited debates in my Ford Falcon parked at McDonald’s on Sunday nights; that warm spring night when we dashed from Hallett Hall into the rain, skipping through puddles and laughing like four-year-olds, she sparkly eyed, even after the shower had soaked her curly hair into a rag mop; that fall weekend when she and two friends squeezed into my car after dinner and we drove all night to watch our Colorado Buffaloes play the Jayhawks in Kansas. She dozed through the game, despite raucous fans and unforgiving bleachers. We lost 34–6.

  Throughout our early college years, Annie had been my best friend. The girl-next-door kind of friend. The friend I could meet for coffee on the spur of the moment—no shower, shave, or ironed shirt needed. The everyday friend who swapped tales with me from the books we’d read and news we’d heard. The friend who consoled me when my father was killed. The first person I called when the Peace Corps invited me to go to Venezuela.

  Those were our “old buddy” years, 1960–1963, before the 1964 March winds blew the cobwebs out of my brain and I realized Annie was a girl—a captivating one.

  Take last weekend (Friday night, May 29, to be exact). I converted my room into a photo studio—flood lamps, reflectors, a bouquet of flowers, borrowed bedspread, fluffy throw pillows—and coaxed her into wearing her nightie for a photo shoot. No big deal, I said. We’d shot dozens of pictures of each other for our photojournalism class, capturing close-ups in different moods and different thoughts and experimenting with shadows and light. We’d posed like nature lovers at Varsity Lake and big-time reporters at our typewriters.

  Still, it took some cajoling. “I want to print a bunch of eleven-by-fourteens and mount them on my headboard,” I told her. “That way, I’ll finally get to sleep with you. Every night.”

  She glared, but a grin slowly formed. “Okay, if it’s The Clothed Maja you want me to model and not that au naturel one you’re always raving about.”

  Annie in her nightie. Wow. A silky, ivory-colored midthigh number slit up both sides to her hips, clinging so suggestively it advertised every curve and hill. We did well for an hour or so, but when she put on those come-hither looks of hers and swished her fanny? Well, I lost my focus. She did too. We didn’t go all the way. She was unbending on that score. But that was a night I’d never forget.

  Now she was on her way to Germany to see her West Point lieutenant, my competitor, the guy who mailed her reams of letters, hours of tape-recorded sweet nothings, and fancy gifts I couldn’t match, like the hand-blown German crystal vase I had packed so carefully into her mother’s car.

  It didn’t help that they had spent so little time together. She didn’t know his foibles and annoying habits. Surely he had some. Annie knew me, though—every fiery outburst, every dirty little secret—down to the graphic intimacies of my past relationships. Worse, I had gotten so wrapped up in the joy of sex
that I’d pestered Annie to take on a lover of her own (not me, by the way—I was myopic in those days). I couldn’t wait for her to experience it for herself.

  One thing was clear: I was in a bare-knuckle bout with one Lieutenant Jack Sigg for Annie’s heart. And he wore the champion’s belt. I was an amateur, better suited for a round with a sparring partner than a go at the title. Having never met him, I was flailing about in the dark. He was a shadowy phantom like those CU jocks who dominated the headlines but popped up on campus only on game days. I did know of his tight friendship with Annie’s older brother. And I’d seen a photo. Jack was a stud.

  Not only that, the lieutenant had the whole United States Army on his side. Annie’s family was military to the core. By contrast, I was in a battle with my draft board to be classified “I-O, Conscientious Objector.” I couldn’t take a human life, I had told them in a letter, nor could I support a country that did. I’d pledged to myself I would go to prison before I’d go into the army. The board sent me a new draft card, stamped “II-S, Student Deferment.” I was sure they would reclassify me “I-A, Available for Military Service” and snatch me up the moment I graduated. In two days.

  That, too, was a slap in the face. Annie was so hot to get to Germany she wouldn’t even stick around for commencement. Mine and hers.

  As if all that weren’t bad enough, Annie and the lieutenant were about to travel Europe together in the hottest car on the road: a 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. They would have weeks alone. And I knew how sensual Annie could be. What if he picked up where I’d left off, leaving me to choke in his exhaust?

  So, late on the afternoon of June 4, 1964, alone on the steps of Annie’s dorm, I wrestled with this perplexing question: Would the foundation she and I had built over four years be enough to override my hotspur outbursts, trump the military ethos she’d grown up with, counter the coming full-court press from Lieutenant Sigg, and keep the flame alive for two years while I served my country in my own way, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Venezuela?

  I flashed back to exactly one year earlier, when my girlfriend Steffi had flown to San Francisco to scout out jobs and to see if two years of letters from a former sweetheart really meant they might have a future together. She had come back aglow in his love. “But I’ll stay in Colorado. If you’re willing to commit,” she said.

  I wanted to say “I love you. Stay. We’ll make it work.” But marriage meant shackling myself to someone forever. I wanted to be free, to travel, to experience life. Oh, I had a thousand excuses. “I hate to see you go,” I whimpered. She left for San Francisco the next day. I never saw her again.

  If Steffi’s weeklong visit to an ex-boyfriend could fan two-year-old ashes into a wildfire, what might a European summer with Lieutenant Sigg do to Annie?

  Given how much my love for Annie had grown that year, losing Steffi had been a godsend. But losing love through your own timidity is like snatching up a handful of hot coals. It hurts like hell, and it’s a powerful incentive not to do it again. Plus, it leaves lasting scars. Yet there I was, stoking a roaring fire, still unwilling to commit. I had told Annie I loved her, but I had choked on the M-word.

  What a simpleton!

  Ann

  Thursday, June 4, 1964, Boulder. For an instant, Terry filled my rearview mirror, slouched on my dorm steps like a cast-off Raggedy Andy. His dejection stabbed at my heart. The image sailed quickly out of view, but not the searing ache.

  Where was that guy I had grown to love? Where was that free spirit, that joie de vivre, that quirky sense of humor? Smothered. All of them. Tuesday night, in the oppressive pessimism that had fouled the air in his car, I’d told him, “This isn’t the end of the world. I’ve been planning this trip for five months. You were my travel agent, my cheerleader—if you recall.”

  “Yeah, that was before I realized I couldn’t live without you.”

  I teetered on the slippery stepping stones of my own emotions. How could I reassure him, when I felt so torn myself?

  Terry and I had met at the student-run Colorado Daily my first week at the university, but we had known of each other in high school. He’d written to me my senior year after my essay, “Why I Want to Be a Newspaper Woman,” won a statewide journalism contest. My prize: a trip to Detroit to represent Colorado at the Ford National Teen-Age Press Conference for the unveiling of their hot new model, the Falcon. Our high schools were thirty miles apart in southern Colorado’s isolated San Luis Valley, and Terry had won the contest the previous year.

  The Ford conference was a big deal for the students and their families, and for the local San Luis Valley Courier. As they did every year for the proud winner, the newspaper ran a front-page photo of me posed at the steps of a Frontier Airlines DC-3 before the flight left Alamosa for Denver, where I caught a TWA flight to Henry Ford’s well-publicized shindig. In Detroit, I had my photo taken shaking hands with Mr. Ford himself.

  Terry’s letter was charming, from the “Dear Miss Garretson” to the hearty congratulations to the shared bond of being from the San Luis Valley to the pitch to study journalism at CU and work on the Colorado Daily. He even invited me to an upcoming CU-sponsored journalism workshop for high school students. And the letter was grammatically perfect. Obviously written, edited, and retyped.

  The following September, I was the country mouse when I ventured into the Daily office to see if they needed another reporter. The receptionist pointed to the city editor. I tiptoed over. This little guy was scrunched over a typewriter, pounding so fast I expected sparks. His shirt looked like he’d slept in it. I stood there. He typed on.

  “Excuse me,” I said. He jerked out the page, seized a clean sheet of newsprint, and cranked it in. “Are you Terry?”

  He glanced up. Oh my, such bloodshot eyes. Beyond bloodshot: the red of a nocturnal creature who could see in the dark. “Yep. And you are . . . ?”

  I told him.

  “Garretson? From Alamosa?” He jumped up and thrust out his hand, all business, no smile or even a mention of that letter I hadn’t answered. (My girlfriend had heard he was “really conceited,” so I hadn’t written.)

  He sent me to cover a speech. I wrote my story. He massacred it with red ink. “Rewrite,” he said. Sure, he was city editor, an award-winning journalist, but I’d won the same contest, and like him, I had edited my high school newspaper. But I rewrote the story. Twice. Same thing happened with my next assignment and the next.

  My writing got sharper and his edits fewer, sprinkled here and there with a scribbled “great job.” We wrote a few stories as a team, not as editor and reporter. I became “one of the guys” at the Daily.

  One school night just before spring break, as we were working feverishly toward our midnight deadline at the Daily, Terry cruised past and dropped a neatly folded stretch of toilet paper on my desk, meticulously typed on from top to bottom. The first item read:

  EDITORS: Beginning today, UPI is initiating a strenuous conservancy campaign to save money and time. Henceforth, we will use this type of copy paper. You will benefit, as it has a practical use after having been read. This is another improvement initiated by United Press International.

  The four feet of toilet paper carried a phony news story about a “sinister plot” to kidnap a Cross Arrow Ranch cowgirl (me). A made-up quote from CU president “Dr. Figg Newton” (his given name was Quigg) warned students to mind their manners and remember their morals when driving back to school after the break. He singled out “two students from Colorado’s San Luis Valley”—Terry and me—“who took three days to drive the 250 miles from Alamosa to Boulder.” At the time, we were not boyfriend and girlfriend. Terry hadn’t even offered me a ride home from CU, though our ranch was only forty miles from his farm near Center.

  The two of us were kindred spirits from the state’s hinterlands, speaking the same argot of small-town compañeros, tinged with idioms from farm and ranch life. Entertaining each other with shiny nuggets from our professors, we relished the conceit of debating topic
s we’d never heard of in our rural high schools. We became pals, meeting for breaks at the student union, going on bike rides, picnicking, and attending plays, lectures, and concerts together. We didn’t “date.” We simply did things together, usually on a whim, no dressing up or trying to impress each other. Best of all, I didn’t have to be on guard with him—too many guys were only after sex.

  Hardly a day went by that we didn’t talk. Terry spun out his secret hopes and dreams, obsessing on the Peace Corps and talking endlessly about living overseas. He pressed me for every detail of my freshman year of high school, the year Dad was commander of the US Army’s port of Leghorn in Livorno, Italy.

  He also fanaticized about owning a small-town newspaper, becoming a modern-day Lincoln Steffens or Upton Sinclair, exposing corruption, digging out injustice, and writing editorials to spotlight racism and poverty.

  I was less sure about my future. I had declared a journalism major, but in my junior year, I took an investigative reporting lab class that required me to interview local leaders on Boulder issues. By the time I stuttered my way through the class, I concluded I couldn’t be a journalist like Terry, asking none-of-your-business questions. My parents had taught me not to be rude.

  So I switched to education, deciding I would teach high school kids to love great literature and, in the process, motivate them to work toward creating a better world. I, too, was inspired by the Peace Corps and wanted to join, but I wasn’t brave enough to believe I could actually do it.

  On the afternoon of June 4, 1964, my zany memories of Terry were undermined by thoughts of Jack Sigg and the grand adventure that lay ahead. I was a twenty-two-year-old innocent, so eager for a rendezvous with my lieutenant in Europe that I had jumped at the opportunity to take a no-frills red-eye to Paris and on to Munich. But over the past three months, my feelings for Terry had done a U-turn, snagging me in the throes of an impossible choice.

  I had to find out where the airmail courtship I’d nurtured with Jack would lead. He and I had hatched the trip as a test. Were we the soul mates our letters had promised?