Throwback Thursday - How Steph and Ettie met their husbands, Ray and Bob

The other day I was looking through things that I have kept track of on my computer.  I was specifically looking for information on Steph, my aunt Dot's best friend.    

The picture below was taken on Dot's 83rd birthday, along with the journaling that I wrote about that visit.  Steph and Ettie both talked about how they came to meet their husbands.

"Saturday, September 15, 2007 – Today we celebrated Dot’s 83^rd birthday.  Linda and Ettie came up on Thursday night.  I had gotten the day off on Friday and it was so nice to have some time to just visit.  We went over to Dot’s for lunch.  

Steph was there, and we had such a nice time.  Steph told us all about how she happened to come to live at Nan’s for a few years.  She came to Holyoke from New Jersey to help out her sister in the summer, went to Bethany and became friends with Ettie and Dot.  Her sister eventually moved back to NJ and Dot and Ettie talked her into living at their house.  She met Ray where she worked at Valley Manufacturing on Birnie Ave in Springfield.  She said it was an old foundry.  They hired Ray and his father because they were pattern makers.  She told us all about how they met, dated, and eventually got married.  

Then Ettie told us about how she met Bob at Framingham Camp in 1945 when she was about 15 or so.  It was the one and only time they had boys and girls camp together.  After that the boys went one week and the girls went another.  David Flower’s (one of the pastors at our church when I was young) mother, Alice Flower, was the camp speaker.  Ettie’s friend Allie Ree Eide (her father was the pastor at the time) wanted Ettie to go to camp.  Nan didn’t want her to go, but Dot got Nan to let Ettie go.  A girl from the Hartford church where Bob attended, Eunice Frick, introduced them.  He asked her to go to a bonfire with him, and also another guy, George Cook asked her to go and she said yes to both of them.  They both showed up at her cabin, and she had to make a choice as to who she wanted to go to the bonfire with and she chose Bob, and the rest is history.  Anyhow, we had a wonderful time that afternoon."

I am so glad that I wrote that all down.  I would never have remembered it otherwise.  Even though Dot and Ettie are both gone now, I still keep in touch with Steph.  She is so much a part of my family and I just love her.