It all started 53 years ago today

Today’s the day.

Today’s the day 53 years ago that Connie and I met.

We were college students at the time, and we’ll celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in June. So that was an eventful evening back on April 7, 1968.

It had been a crazy week: Lyndon Baines Johnson had announced on Sunday night that he would not seek re-election as president, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at mid-week and on Saturday downtown Richmond was the scene of a pair of explosions that claimed the lives of 41 people.

I was a sophomore. She was a freshman. We were both pretty much clueless.

Stumbling through my second year at Earlham College — I’d gotten a D in geology in the fall — I apparently thought of myself as something of a rock impresario. I’d made arrangements for Denny, a buddy of mine who played guitar, to sit in with the established rock band on campus.

My roommate at the time was in the band, and I knew there was some tension between the members. For some reason, the lead guitar player thought it was more important to focus on his studies as a pre-med student than to learn new tunes with the rest of the group.

I figured Denny could take his place, and I finagled an opportunity to make that happen.

Connie and I weren’t complete strangers at that point. She knew me as some guy that people called “Jocko.” I knew her because I’d struck up a conversation with one of her brothers when he was on campus.

But I wasn’t the only person who had noticed her.

My buddy Denny is the one who invited her to stop by the group’s practice — and what was essentially his audition — that evening.

If you’ve ever been around a garage band, you can envision how the evening went.

There was feedback. There was an abundance of disorganization and an absence of communication. But eventually things started to come together. It looked as if it was all a matter of the chemistry coming together.

So I figured it was time to leave. And I figured it was time to ask this beautiful girl from the freshman class if she’d like to go for a walk.

That — in its entirety — was the clever line I used: “Would you like to go for a walk?”

What can I say? It worked.

We walked around campus and talked about ourselves and our families and our plans for the future and our dreams. We stopped for a Coke in a campus hangout and talked some more.

About a week later, I told my parents on a call from a payphone in my dorm that I had met the girl I was going to marry.

They were terrified. Her parents were terrified as well, even though we assured everyone that our plans were to get our degrees before getting hitched.

And as for Denny? The audition was a flop. He thought the upperclassmen in the group were a stodgy bunch and didn’t understand where rock was going. I suspect he also knew that he was a much better musician than the rest of them.

But we remained friends.

Four or five years later, he was still pursuing a career as a rock star and was with a group performing in Indianapolis. We made a point of getting to the club so we could reconnect.

There was a shout-out from the make-shift stage when we walked in.

And if he were any hard feelings about the fact that Connie had ended up with me that night 53 years ago, Denny didn’t show it.