It was 1937. I was 20 and Ardis was 17 when we started going steady. At the time, Ardis was taking a post-graduate course at Quincy High School in Quincy, MI. She stayed at a shirt-tailed relation, Ed and Marie Jennings, very nice people. I went up almost every weekend, and we went out to a movie or dinner or we'd come home and I'd take her back on Sunday night. That went on for a year. After she graduated, she went to work in Coldwater. I think it was a welfare office there. At about this time, I went to work at the Hillsdale Manufacturing Company, who made clothing. They made mostly pants, and people coined the company the pants factory. They shipped it out to the Mayes Company, the Hudson Company, and many other smaller companies. This was in the old factory downtown, across from the courthouse, that looked like an old house converted. After about a year, their business was thriving, and old Joe Baumgordener decided to build a new factory, a bigger factory, out on Old 99, about a mile from town. I continued to work tearing down the old factory and helping build the new factory. When it was finished, I went inside the new factory and worked in the shipping department on a machine presser.
Ardis, at that time, was working in a dime store in Hillsdale, Murphy's Dime Store. She made $9.90 a week, including Saturdays. She wasn't getting very rich, but she was making some money anyway. I wasn't getting very rich either, (around $15 a week) until I went to work at night fixing sewing machines for $26 a week. Then, we could afford the nickel hamburgers and the 15-cent movies much better. Plus, we could afford our room rent much better. I had a room alone in the same house as Ardis. Ardis shared a room with Beth O'Tenny, who also worked in the store. This was in the latter part of 1939. We continued to work and gain momentum, so to speak, in all phases of our lives until 1941. I remember coming home one time, (and by that I mean stopping at my folks, then going on to Ardis' folks). When turning the corner on 99 east of Frontier, I was thinking no one in this world could be any more in love than we were – together most of the time and couldn't stand to be apart. So why wait any longer? When we turned the corner, I blurted out, "Hey, lets get married, honey!" I always called her honey then. She said "When?" I said, "Right away." So, our folks were told, and preparations were started. This was 1941, of course. We decided to eventually get married the 15th of February. We chose this date because Ardis had heard over the radio that Lula Bell and Scotty (popular radio program) was to be performing at the Grand Ole Opry in Cincinnati, OH beginning the 16th of February. Anyway, she wrote for tickets, front row tickets, to the show for our honeymoon trip to Cincinnati. If I remember correctly, I had $22 in my pocket when we started for the show, and I remember the hotel cost a dollar and a half, and gas at that time was 9 ¢ a gallon. So, it was quite reasonable, and I figured we had plenty of money. Anyway, when we got back after going to Chattanooga, Tennessee, (they called it the rock city, and cave city, and so forth), we returned home and looked around for a place to stay. We heard that some people were living in house trailers at the fairground, Hillsdale County Fairground. So, we thought about that, in fact we checked into the trailer propositions, and found a small one. We gave 192 dollars for it, I remember that. It was a 16-foot trailer, called a silver top. I don't know why, maybe because it had a silver top on it. Anyway, we moved it down to the fairground, and took up housekeeping, so to speak. The trailers then, compared to the trailers now, would have probably been classified as unlivable. They were cold and they were uninsulated. This trailer we had had a coal burning stove in it that wouldn't last all night. And in the morning it would be really cold. We'd have to get up and start the fire and start all over again. The first week we lived in the trailer, Ardis got pneumonia. She was really sick for a week. That was at a time when they had just come out with penicillin. I think that's probably what saved her life.
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