Cape Cod Love Story

We met on a blind date in in Newport

They meet on a blind date during OCS in Newport, married in Waikiki, baby-sat for an Arab Princess in Riyadh and ended on Cape Cod for their fiftieth anniversary in five more months.

My wife, Ellen, and I met on a blind date. We were with different partners on a double date when I was at Officer Candidate School, Newport, RI. One of my roommates made the date for the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956. We ended up at the Viking Hotel Bar where we danced and drank. Neither of us connected with our dates, so I asked Ellen to dance and, with that, the story began.

After several weeks of training, the OCs got weekends off, so I called Ellen. She was living in Boston and working in Cambridge at the time. We went out together only about four times. After OCS, I was transferred to Jacksonville Naval Air Station for ten more weeks of training. From there, we wrote to each other every day. When I got my orders to NAS Barbers Point, Hawaii, I was given leave time, so I went back to see Ellen. Her home was in Scituate, MA at the time and I remember it clearly. I proposed to her in my car in her driveway and she accepted. Four months later, Ellen flew to Hawaii and we were married on December 7, 1957. accompanied by my sister, Jean, who acted as Maid of Honor. We had our wedding reception at the Cannon Club, an officer's club, on the side of Diamond Head overlooking Waikiki.

During the next three years, our daughter, Jill, was born at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu. Ellen enjoyed the beach at Waikiki while I deployed to Midway Island for two weeks out of every month. After my discharge from the Navy, we moved back to New England and lived in Scituate for 30 years.

During  the 45 years, after my Navy discharge, Ellen and I survived many difficulties, not unlike most couples, but our love for each other has remained steadfastDuring that time we added two more children to our family, Martha in 1961, and Glenn in 1966. In all, we now have six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, all doing well.  

During  the 45 years, after my Navy discharge, Ellen and I survived many difficulties, not unlike most couples, but our love for each other has remained steadfast. After working part-time for many of those years, and during a stretch when I was laid off from my work, Ellen applied for and got a bi-coastal job as a live-in Nanny for the Chief Executive Officer of Paramount Domestic Television, so off she went to Beverly Hills and I followed several months later.

Ellen and I decided that that the Nanny job was a bit too much and paid too little, so she gave it up and applied for another job at an agency. She then went to work as a live-in Nanny for a movie producer in Beverly Hills while I lived in Venice Beach and worked selling securities for the Bank of America in the Marina Del Rey area.

Baby-sitting a Princess in the palace at Riyadh

A year later, Ellen made another change. She was hired by a Saudi Arabian princess to be the Nanny for an expected child in Riyadh. So, she spent the next year in the palace there. When she returned, our journey took us from LA to Palo Alto where we spent five wonderful years at Stanford University as managers for a condominium complex on the campus and from that time on we were never separated. Ellen worked as a live-out Nanny in Woodside during that time.

To Cape Cod  and our Golden Wedding Anniversary

In 2000, we moved to Cape Cod where we have enjoyed a completely different lifestyle from what we experienced in California. In December, 2007 we will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. We have never forgotten the advice the minister who married us gave us: Never use what has happened in the past as a weapon in an argument. Our strength, I think, is in our differences. Ellen is an Aquarius, I am a Taurus. On that basis, we're not supposed to be completely compatible, but it looks like we have gone contrary to the universe. We have 49-^1/2 years to prove it.
 
John Prophet lives and writes about Harwich in a blog here. He has chaired two writing groups at the Brooks Free Library; is an active member of Sisters in Crime, & The Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. John holds a Masters degree in Special Education from Boston University. He is also an accomplished  novelist. A Jaded Affair, the fifth Casey Miller mystery is now available online at all major outlets. To order call toll free: 877-823-9235. Visit his website here.

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The Story of my love

Love among the Beatniks
Provincetown, 3:30pm, August 22, 1959

By Rafio the Mad Monk, a.k.a. Blogfather, a.k.a. Walter Brooks 

I wasn't always a journalist.  I started out as one, but found myself scribbling poetry with an definite anti-establishment slant during the years now known as the Beatnik Era. I finally bit the bullet, quit my ad agency job on Madison Avenue and moved into a one-room apartment on 10th Street in Greenwich Village.

Beat poetry was such a rage in the 1960s that although there were a dozen coffee houses offering it, getting a gig at one was highly competitive, so while auditioning I also set up my easel on Sixth Avenue near Waverly Place where the street portrait artists hung out in those days.

I was good enough at it to pay the rent, eat three-squares and had time to brush up on my poetry and its delivery. 

But NYC gets damned hot by mid-August, and I noticed that one by one my fellow artists departed for Provincetown, so when a friend offered me a ride there on the back of his motor scooter I packed up my easel and left for the Cape.

It took us two days at about 40mph to get there.  We camped out the first night of our trip in the back-country in Greenwich, CT where I had previously  lived in an 11-room house next t0 the Greenwich Country Club and worked at the Greenwich Time newspaper.

Pitch a tent in the dunes at Land's End - Looks are deceiving

When we finally arrived in Ptown late in the second day, we pitched our pup tent in the sand dunes at the tip of Cape Cod.  The next day I set up my easel on the Porch of the Crown & Anchor and started sketching portraits.

She had a shimmering, breathtaking beauty.I soon noticed an especially beautiful girl strolling along Commercial Street every day. She was indescribably beautiful with long, blond hair pigtailed down to her waist and a shape to get anyone's complete attention.  She had a shimmering beauty and grace which I can still recall in complete detail nearly a half century later.  I had never seen a more beautiful woman.

But she looked so young, sweet and innocent, I didn't have the nerve to make a play for her - me a jaded, 28-year-old Beatnik and her an innocent young, 17-year-old high schooler. 

After admiring her from afar for a week, the day came when I lost my reserve. It happened when I returned from a swim in the harbor and noticed that "sweet, innocent" young thing walking off with my sketch pad in the company of her two girlfriends.

Reticence gone, I accosted her to demand an explanation.  She looked me straight in the eyes and said, "I had to have the art - this was so beautiful."

All my anger deflated, the three of us exchanged small talk until one of the girls asked where I was staying, and I of course invited them all to see my pup tent in the dunes. 

Where they really the Perseids?

The four of us hiked to my camp site on a high dune north of the Moors and sat gabbing the earth-shattering stuff that young, spirited types have always talked about - life, love, war, peace, etc. and keep yakking for hours until long after dark. 

Then as I pontificated my imagined genius, the stars began to fall. Literally.

It wasn't until years later I realized it was the start of the annual Perseid meteor showers in late August or early September, but the girl and I assumed they were falling just for us.

After several hours, her two guardian girlfriends stood up and said, "you two don't need us", and left Patricia and Rafio alone in the dunes.

Patricia never really left.

We married ourselves using our own personal wedding vows in Our Lady of the Harbor Church in Ptown the next day. 

Today, I publish Best Read Guide and this online newspaper.

Patricia today is VP and co-owner of Best Read Guide and eCape.com.Patricia is as beautiful as she ever was and sells advertising for our companies, and one of our two sons and his wife work beside us.  We'll take their two children to Disney for the third time this Fall.

If we last until August 22, 2009, we'll celebrate fifty years of a very exciting life together. 

 If you want more of this ancient history, see my column last  November here.

An invitation

Pundits tell us that unlike true love, the web is forever.  So if you really love your mate, why don't you tell the world about how you met.  Every story is unique, and if you met on Cape Cod we'll love to publish YOUR LOVE STORY here.

Simply send me or our Editrix Maggie an email with your love tale, and include a photo from that wonderful time of your life and we'll do the rest.

Of course, you can be anonymous if you wish. 

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The Apartment, the facial hair and the wedding

Epicure Girl Goes Native
Catching a "keeper" on Cape Cod


   The Epicure on Main StreetI met my husband in the Impudent Oyster in Chatham in late June 1985 at about 10 pm. He was a friend of a friend (Rob) of a friend (Marge) of a friend (Debbie) and wound up sitting next to me. We talked about violins and Minoan art and he said he would show me Chatham from his boat and from his four wheel drive vehicle on Nauset Beach.

I thought he was ultra nice but was ambivalent about his moustache. (He got rid of it 8 months later in a pensione in Vienna.)

At the time, I was a college student living with 27 other coeds in dormitory-style digs which occupied the two floors above the Epicure Liquor Store on Main Street in Chatham. It cost me $55/week. Like every other place I have lived, this has since gone condo. I had no car and walked to my jobs around town.

When it was time to leave the Oyster, he asked me to write down my phone number... but I  transposed the last two numbers by mistakeThe only beach I could get to was Lighthouse Beach in Chatham. Of course, I still had a great time living at the Epicure even though officially there were no guys allowed upstairs ever. But the store closed at 11 and then watch out. When we met I was barely 20 and he was 22. He had always thought he would get married when he was 30 but it ended up being 24.

When it was time to leave the Oyster, he asked me to write down my phone number so he could call me to take me out on Nauset Beach in his truck. But I inadvertently transposed two of the numbers--I did not give out this number very much--it was the sole phone for all 28 girls. No cell phones back then!

A week later, I quit my job and came back to the Epicure. The phone rang and it was himA week later, I quit my job and came back to the Epicure. The phone rang and it was him. I was in a what-the-hell mood and said, sure come pick me up, let's go to the beach. He showed up and I got in his truck. He later told me he had sort of forgotten what I looked like and breathed a sigh of relief when he picked me up.

He told me that he had been calling the number I gave him and that it was for the employee dorms at the Chatham Bars Inn. So whoever answered would say that I was not there (even though they didn't know me.) Finally he got the number for the Epicure and called me. Before going to the beach we liberated a bottle of champagne from his parent's house (yuck--hated it then and hate it now but pretended I liked it) and then picked up his friend Rob, whose had the exact same first and last name of the boss I had just quit working for.

My husband and Rob had been without girlfriends all summer and went fishing or boating together every day after work. They didn't go Brokeback or anything, but Rob kept trying to come along on many of our subsequent outings. Every day for two weeks, my husband would pick me up after work (I found two other jobs the next day) and we would go on some outdoor adventure.

  He had everything - a motor boat for fishing and water skiing, a sailboat for evening sails, a truck for going out on Nauset, plus a surfboardHe had everything--a motor boat for fishing and water skiing, a sailboat for evening sails, a truck for going out on Nauset, plus a surfboard. We caught bluefish and grilled them. We dug for steamers and grilled them.

I was usually a good sport and didn't mind walking through beach grass from the boat to the beach ("the beach grass test" he called it). When we went to Monomoy Beach, which is difficult to anchor at, I often jumped off the side of his motor boat wearing a red bikini with a cooler on top of my head into 5 feet of surf, because he said it was safe and I did not know any better. But it was safe. He found a white stone on Monomoy that perfectly fit in my navel which I still have.

Five months after we met, I went away to Grenoble in the South of France for a semester abroad I had been planningWe had dinner in a fancy Italian restaurant in Hyannis and afterward he showed me all the constellations while we were lying down on a blanket on Jackknife Beach in Chatham. No hanky panky and I was beginning to wonder of he had really gone Brokeback or was just a perfect gentlemen. (It is definitely the latter.) We were just friends for two weeks and then once Rob left us alone, we fell madly in love and have been together ever since. We saw "Back to the Future" together and now 21 years later, we have made our destined two kids (remember that part of the movie.)

   He still takes me to the Outer Beach, but we bring our two kids along nowFive months after we met, I went away to Grenoble in the South of France for a semester abroad I had been planning. He missed me so much and worried that I might run off with some Euro guy (no way--they are too skinny and indoorsy for me) that when he came to visit in March, he proposed to me in Amsterdam at the Hotel Toren, when he had really wanted to propose later on in our trip on a gondola in Venice. I played a part in the premature Dutch proposal because I kept nagging him at Melkweg (look it up) about the future of our relationship.

After getting engaged, I was the envy of my sorority sisters and quit going to frat parties. I spent another semester in London, graduated, we got married at 7:30 p.m. in a southern June wedding with eight bridesmaids, honeymooned in Greece, worked in Boston, and moved to the Cape in 1993. We still go boating to the same beaches we did in 1985, which are the beaches my husband went to as a kid. But now, he doesn't take me fishing, he takes our son. And even though, after two kids, the navel stone doesn't fit anymore, I still jump into the surf from our boat at Monomoy.

CapeMom 

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Tell us the story of your love

Everyone's love story should be told
And here's where you can tell it

Cape Cod Love Story is where you can write the story of your own love affair, past, present or even future.

All you have to do is email us the story of your love, and we'll add it to this blog for the world to read. You may include a photo if you wish, and we must be able to verify your identity although we'll keep it annonymous if you wish.

Beneath this post is our first "Cape Cod Love Story". 

Help us prove that H. L.Mencken was wrong when he said, "Love is the illusion that one person is different than another."

Read the love staory below and email yours to us right NOW. 

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