Our Life Together, part 3

by Sylvia French Waack

The Question

As spring began to come.  we had another Campus Day with free time.  During the times of our working together, I finally agreed for him to ask the matron for date time.  We were assigned the library for our dates.

It was not long until he asked me to marry him.  I had had so much heartache with Mother disapproving of my marrying Glidden, that I had made up my mind I would never agree to marry any one that my parents did not approve of.  So I told him, “No,” not until my parents would accept him.  He wrote Daddy, but Daddy wrote back that he did not know Chester well enough to agree to our getting married.

With the Easter Holiday coming up, I asked Chester to drive Vera, Martha and me home, with a chaperone, the soon to be Mrs. Wallace Bragg.  He was most happy to do that.  We all had a very nice time.

The Answer

In the meantime Mother had taken the problem of our getting married to our pastor at Faith Tabernacle, Rev. W. T. Garvin.  He told her he thought it was of the Lord, that we made a beautiful couple; that Chester would perk Sylvia up and Sylvia would help to hold Chester down.  So she was pretty well won over by the time we got home and she and Daddy gave us their consent for us to be married.

On our date time, April 3rd, Mother and Daddy’s wedding anniversary, I told Chester that I would marry him.  Then in May, the night before the Senior Picnic, Chester gave me an engagement ring.  He had just put it on my finger and had his arm around me, and we were both looking at the ring, when Sister Atkinson, one of the faculty, walked into the library.  She backed out real quickly, and I am sure she thought we did not see her.  But Chester said, she really kept her eye on him all the next day at the picnic.

School was soon over and we parted.  Chester going to Illinois to take a little church pastorate and me back home.

Mother worked at Murdy’s combination grocery, meat, hardware and dry goods store to help out with the groceries and clothing for the family.  Daddy’s income was from his brass and aluminum shop, which he had built on the back of our lot and then later built a new building on the lot East of our home.  Since it was the depression and he had very little, or practically no work, he and Glidden had teamed up together to do any kind of work they could find: window washing, gardening, repair work of any type.  So it became very obvious to me that I could not return to school the coming fall.

Chester and I had discussed a fall wedding, but Mother would not hear to that.  If we were bound and determined (as she put it) to get married, then she wanted a summer wedding while the summer flowers were blooming.  She was always so good at working with flowers.  She had planned numerous weddings for the girls in the churches where they attended.  So she had her way.  We decided on July 20th for the wedding.

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