Dale Boothby summer 1950 Grass Valley, California
Margaret Hansen summer 1950 Grass Valley, California
This week's theme is Valentine. This is the story of how my father, Dale Richard Boothby and my mother, Margaret Ann Hansen met when they were both 9 years old. They dated in their senior year of high school, eventually married and stayed happily married for 51 years. I thought this was a perfect story for Valentines Day. And, the prompt got my Mom to finally write it down.
This story is in the words of my Mom....(thank you for sharing your memories!)....
"After our house fire we moved in with Nana in her big house on South Auburn Street, where A&A Sheet Metal is now. Their office building is where our apple and pear orchard were and the house was on the hill behind that. I think that was 1950."
"In the summer time we all moved into town to Pleasant Street, a big house with a yard and a little rental in the back. I don't know if it was to be purchased or if we were renting at the time, but we lived there such a short time I don't remember a lot about the house. I do remember that the Boothbys lived at the very end of Pleasant Street in small house that had a hedge in front so you could not see into the yard. Once Claire (Mom's younger sister) and I went up the street and "lurked" near the hedge to listed to Nino and Nonna talking in Italian. It was very exotic!!"
"There were lots of kids our age, or close, living nearby so we had others to play with during the long summer days. The polio epidemic struck GV that summer and one boy up on High Street came down with it so we were pretty much confined to our own yard after that. Dale and Kent Boothby were some of the kids we played with. Dale got a new Schwin bike that summer and brought it down for us to see. I asked to ride it (I had never ridden a bike before) and took it for a short ride on the sidewalk in front of our house and then onto the dirt walkway next door where the cement ended and where there were rocks at the edge between the trail and the street. The bike and I fell off the walkway and onto the rocks where I ended up with a skinned leg from the rocks. I went screaming into the house, bleeding and scraped up, and left the bike laying where it fell. I was getting patched up when an indignant Mrs. Boothby came down the street to get the bike and yelled at me and my mother about leaving the bike near the road and how I had scratched it all up. You can tell I've never really forgiven her for being more concerned about the new bike than my wounds!! Dale and Kent came down often and we played "house" with Dale and me as parents and Kent and Claire as the kids. We had a basement reached from the outside of the house where we set up chairs and a table for our housekeeping events."
"At that time kids were all about cowboys and horses. We played Cowboys and Indians, went to the Saturday movies where a western was always part of the day along with cartoons and a feature film. Everyone we knew had cap guns (Claire and I were not allowed the gun thing, but had a "cap cane" where you'd insert the cap on one end and bang it on the ground to make it go off. I thought that was really dumb, but there you were if your parents did not approve of guns). I read books about horses, made stick horses out of tree branches and a rope, etc. So one day a man came around the neighborhood with a cute Shetland pony and lots of different outfits for boys and girls and would, for a fee, take pictures of the kids sitting on the pony. Claire and I begged to be allowed to have our pictures taken and we dressed up in the costumes and the man took the pictures. He sent the photos in the mail later. A lot of other kids in the neighborhood also had their pictures taken with the pony that summer, including Dale and Kent."
"In later years, when anyone would ask how we met, Dale would say, 'We met when were in the third grade and played house in her basement and we've been playing house ever since!' It was his standard line and always got a laugh. We were in the same class in 5th grade and in 9th grade were in Latin I class together. We took all four years of Latin where we got to know each other pretty well, started dating in our senior year after we had both been accepted at UOP (University of the Pacific). The rest is history, as they say. It was always a point of pride for us to be able to say we'd known each other since we were 9 and living on the same street and then Dale would say his famous line. We 'played house' for 51 years."
Margaret and Dale Boothby 25 June 1961 and at their 50th Wedding Anniversary Celebration in 2011.
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