SALLY

My son David flies in from California to see me two or three times a year.  He comes Friday evening and leaves on Sunday.  It is always a short visit, yet he always wants to spend a day driving the 60 miles to see Sally at her farm near Decatur. 

Today is Sally’s birthday.  She is a special person.  No wonder David wants to see her every time he comes to Texas. 

Sally and I have been friends for 68 years.  I remember vividly the day I met her.  I was eating a sandwich in the lunchroom at Paschal High School when a friend brought in a new girl, who had just moved to Texas from New York.  Sally was short (about the same height as my 5'1") and stocky with beautiful shoulder-length black hair.  She wore a red and gray checked suit, totally unlike anything worn by other girls in our high school.  To me she looked exotic and sophisticated – after all, she was a New Yorker. 

Before coming to Texas she began high school in New York, where her stepfather, Charles, worked for the Statler Hotel chain.  But Sally’s roots were deep in Pennsylvania, where her grandfather and great-grandfather had been doctors in Wernersville.

World War II brought Sally to Texas.  In those days planes could not fly coast-to-coast without refueling.  Navy planes flying across country to the War in the Pacific refueled in Fort Worth. Charles Hastings was commanding officer of the Navy’s base here. 

How handsome he looked in his Lt. Commander’s uniform!  As for Sally’s mother, she reminded me of the Duchess of Windsor.  Sally was pretty; her mother was not.  But she was tall and slim and carried herself regally.  Emmy Hastings was a graduate of Bryn Mawr (How I wished I could go to that college!) and read the Montaigne’s essays in the original French.

The Hastings rented a big, Victorian house on Penn Street.  On the coffee table in the living room were the latest issues of the Atlantic and the New Yorker.  Going to Sally’s house after school was entering a different World.  Yet in those days I was a partisan Texan and tried to educate them about the Alamo and the Glorious South of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. 

The war ended.  Sally and her mother moved temporarily into quarters at the Marine Base at Eagle Mountain Lake until Sally graduated from Paschal.  The Hastings moved back east, but Sally returned to Texas to enroll in Texas State College for Women with me. 

While living at the Marine base, Sally met a Navy man, just returned from the Pacific, son of a tenant farmer, who grew up in the neighborhood.  He came up to Denton to date her on weekends.  One Saturday, Hugh picked up Sally and me and drove us to Fort Worth.  They dropped me at home and left. 

My mother was furious.  “You and Sally could both be expelled if the college found out she did not spend the weekend here in my house.”

Sally and Hugh went down to the court house and got married.   I doubted the marriage would last a month.  They came from such different backgrounds.  He was a Texan, a graduate of a small town high school with no further education.  He was a Texas Republican; Sally was a Democrat.  He was Church of Christ; she was high church Episcopalian.  They fought constantly and always made up at bedtime.  They had five children.  The marriage lasted until Hugh died, a month before their 60th wedding anniversary. 

Next time I’ll tell more about how Sally became a Texan . . . and I ceased to be one.  And how we maintained our friendship for the next 68 years without ever living in the same town.