RED RIVER, ROMANCE AND A HALF-CENTURY FILLED WITH LOVE

This blog will be pretty long since it will cover a lot of our married life together and that’s been going on for a very long time.



Frank and I met when he was in dental school and we had a whirlwind romance that lasted for 2 years until we married in 1958. During our courtship we did a lot of special things including going to fraternity parties and dances. He was a member of Delta Sigma Delta. One night we went to a fraternity dance which was at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas and the zipper on my dress broke just as we arrived.






Being the gentleman that he always is, he asked the concierge where we could go to fix the problem and they let us go to a room where Frank literally sewed me up in my dress while I still had it on (heaven forbid that he saw me with my dress off at this stage of our relationship!)
We were married in Springer, NM in Frank's church. Since I had been married before, my dress was taupe and made from Peau de soir and silk ... an original by a designer in New York. That dress was a really big deal and the talk of the town in the small town of Springer.






Take a look at the cowboys and cactus on the coffee cups at our wedding breakfast, and don't you just love the feathers on my hat!!! We married in the morning and then headed for Red River. There were nearly 100 people in attendance and almost all of them were Frank's family. Since I am an only child of 5 generations of only children, needless to say, I was overwhelmed.
In the weeks before we married, Frank wrote me and said that there would be cool days and hot nights in Red River. Now things are just the opposite ;-)
My going away outfit was special made as well. His family had a "Squaw Dress" made for me and bought me moccasins. The dress was yellow and had brown and silver ric-rac on it, SOO TACKY , but I was so much in love that I didn't care.






The style was much like the red one in the photograph above.
When we arrived in Red River, we stayed at a place called the El Sombrero Lodge. All we had $100 to our name for our honeymoon, so in order for us to be able to stay for a week, Frank would literally fish for our dinner.





If you brought you own fish, they would cook it for you, give you a baked potato and a salad for only $1.00 per person per meal. What a deal! Here is a photograph of the place today.





It’s still there and looks the same on the outside, but it has changed hands several times over the years.
Frank’s family has a history of having reunions in Red River. Here are a couple of old photographs of times there when Frank was a very little boy. In the first photograph, he's the tiny boy on the left in the front row and then in the one that was taken about 10 years later he's the 4th from the right on the back row. He is the youngest in the family of that generation, so he always got to go everywhere with the family, not unlike our Franklin now. He's the baby of his generation as well. Like Father, like son!!!







Back then, Red River was a wide open town and gambling was legal, so it was the hot spot of Northern New Mexico. All the women would cook everything from scratch. They would even bring live chickens and they had to kill and clean them before frying them for dinner. Times have certainly changed.
We arrived in Red River for our 50th Anniversary celebration on the 12th of July. Our actual anniversary date is the 2nd of August, but we selected a time when the majority of the family could be there. Franklin and Beth had wanted to give us a party in Arlington, but we decided that a family gathering in the place where we spent our honeymoon was more appropriate. We were right.

We all gathered together there for 4 days and a wonderful time was had by all. Franklin and his family were there along with Nicholas and Dayna. Our granddaughter and her family couldn’t make it, but our nieces and nephews along with their families were all there, so there were 23 all totaled.
We ate, drank, played cards,

took hikes, swam and just reminisced and enjoyed each other's company. It was a glorious time.

The swimming pool was heated, but Connor even decided to go for a "dip" in the stream (I'd personally rather eat the dip rather than try to swim in it. It was icy cold but he didn't mind. After all, he was making mud pies!

We even took the ski lift to the top of the mountain one afternoon and took our refreshments with us.

Getting off the lift was exciting … especially for Nicholas who was the official keeper of the libations!

In the evenings Ian would entertain us by playing some of his original music on the guitar and Baby Jack would dance. We'll probably enter them both in America's Got Talent in a few years.

They have little surries that you can rent and those certainly brought back memories for us. Kwane rented one for the entire family to ride around town on and so we took turns filling it up with family members for a couple of hours.

Our oldest children, Jim and Courtney, had a “Surry with a Fringe on the Top” when then were young children in Raton, NM. It was so cute and they were very popular in the neighborhood with the only Surry in town! (Do you recognize me with the scarf and the skinny jeans? I don't!)

Their surrey had been advertised on the Art Linkletter Show on television and my Mother insisted that they have one.
We stayed at The Eisenhut this visit and it was the perfect setting for our group.

We rented 3 condominiums that surrounded the swimming pool. Since there were 3 families involved, each family had their own 3 or 4 bedroom unit. We would gather early in the day and spend the next 16-18 hours together. We ranged in ages from 18 months to 74 years, so with these living arrangements there was a lot to do and the little ones could take a nap as we were always near by.

I had my 72nd birthday while we were there (I’m not the oldest in the group but you know who is ;-) and after dinner in our condo that night, they surprised us with a DVD of our life together. It was wonderfully made since that is both Franklin and Nicholas’ business and the photographs of us, friends and family over the years were all synchronized with some of our favorite music. They even had movies at the end with each family member making a toast to us from their homes. It was wonderful and something we’ll treasure for the rest of our lives. The “production” lasted for over an hour and I can’t remember when I’ve cried so much or so long, but they were certainly tears of joy.
Frank and I surprised everyone with T-shirts that we had made with photographs of everyone who was there on them. We gave them to them that night and everyone wore them the next day for the group activities as well as a group photograph.

There is an enlargement of the photograph on the front of our shirts at the beginning of this entry.
I can’t begin to thank everyone who helped make this such a special time in our lives. I hope that I haven’t bored all of you too much with my rantings and ramblings, but times like this come only once in a lifetime and we have been very blessed to have been able to live, laugh and love each other for over the half century mark. I wanted to share this time with you.
It was sad saying goodbye to our friends and family, and the place where our journey together started. Frank sang , "So, Long, It's Been Good To Know You" as we left.

We're off to Scandinavia in a couple of weeks and won’t be back for a month, so it's time to go home, wash, iron, re-pack and pay bills.
I’ll be signing off with this edition and you probably won't be hearing from me for a while. Please stay tuned for more European adventures! Until then .....

XOXO, Pcasso