Meeting the Dane

Young people are advised to plan ahead, to save for retirement, to acquire skills to prepare for the future. They don’t know. Life has a way of socking you in ways that are impossible to anticipate.

Your entire life can change in an instant. Mine did. Several times.

The first big change in my life came during a break in a night school class, when I walked out into a corridor at TCU and faced a tall young man drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup.

By 1951 my life reached a stalemate. Instead of becoming the intrepid reporter I envisioned in journalism school, at age 22 I was a low-paid writer on the society desk at the Fort Worth Press. I could see no future except at age 40 becoming a spinster still writing little notices of other young girls’ weddings. I applied and was accepted by Columbia University. Surely in New York I would find a more exciting life. I enrolled in night courses at TCU for additional credits before leaving for graduate school in New York.

At the first class in Modern Drama as Literature, this clean-cut young man sat in the chair across the aisle. Then, at the break, he waited for me in the hallway. He was tall – at 6'1" a foot taller than me – nice looking. His round face made him look very young. He invited me to go to a local bar after class, where he ordered a coke after I asked for Dr. Pepper. That night I learned some things about this good-looking young man – but only the superficial things that young people look for. .

Wally was a 21-year-old corporal, stationed at Carswell Air Force Base. He joined the Air Force Reserve to avoid being drafted during the Korean War. Two months later his unit was called up. His best friend, Rodney Lowell, was drafted and fought on the front lines in Korea. Wally served the entire Korean War at a typewriter in Company Headquarters at Carswell in Fort Worth.

He had fair skin but dark brown hair. He called himself “a black Viking.” His strange last name -- Gaarsoe -- was Danish. His grandfather changed the name because there were too many other Sorensens in business in Copenhagen. His grandfather still lived in Copenhagen. I thought it sad that Wally was 21 years old, had never been abroad, had never met his grandfather.
His parents were from Denmark, but he grew up in the Chicago area. His father died just after Wallace completed his first year at Northern Illinois University. He was earning credits for his second year by going to night school. His goal was to become a college professor. He remembered the comfortable life of his teachers in the little college town of DeKalb, Illinois.

A year later Wally and I were married. Instead of New York, I went with him to Chicago. Our plan was for me to work while he completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, then we would spend a summer in Europe, meeting his grandfather and having a second honeymoon in Paris.

All this changed. In graduate school at Northwestern, Wally discovered that graduate degrees required more work than he wanted to do. He gave up all plans for teaching in college, and we became parents of our first child, Karl.

It would be more than twenty years before we made our first trip abroad. We went to Denmark. But not to Paris.