My wife, Mary Ellen and I have been married 53 years, and we always try to spend Thanksgiving with our kids. Some time between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, we’ll share the story of the first Thanksgiving that Mary Ellen and I spent together and how it could have turned out a whole lot differently. If I hadn’t answered the call.
It was Thanksgiving eve, 1959, and I was in my dorm at Miami University in Ohio, about to set out on a long drive to pick Mary Ellen up from her school, the College of Wooster, three-and-a-half-hours north. We’d met that summer when we were both counselors at the same camp, and we decided I would spend Thanksgiving with her family. Even though they lived much closer to my campus—only a half hour away—I’d offered to pick her up so we’d arrive together. It was worth it to go out of my way for her. I tossed some clothes and my toiletries into a suitcase and looked out the window. Cold, but sunny. The drive should be no sweat.
The three-story dormitory housed about four hundred students but that afternoon it was desolate—I must have been one of the last people to leave for the holiday. Even the four pay phones on the first floor were quiet. They usually rang around the clock, the only way for family and friends to get in touch in those days. If one of the phones rang and you happened to walk by, you were supposed to answer it and scribble a message on the clipboard nearby. But that was too much responsibility for me. Besides, I never got any calls. I was home every weekend so if someone had something to tell me, they could find me at my part-time job at the shoe repair shop or talk to me after church.
I headed downstairs and toward the front door. Just as I passed the phones—RIINNNNGGG.
Pick up the phone, I thought, but I continued to walk by.
RIINNNGGGG. Pick up the phone. I glanced back.
It rang a third time. Pick up the phone. I stopped, looked around. No one there but me. Fine. It better be quick…
I picked up. “Hello?”
“Is Lee St. John there?”
“Mary Ellen?”
She sounded relieved. “Yes, it’s me. Don’t come up.”
Mary Ellen said it had been snowing all day in Wooster. By the time I’d get there, the roads would be impassable. She’d found a ride home with one of the gals in her dorm.
“I would’ve waited for you, but we’d probably get stuck here—or freeze out on the road,” she said. “I’m glad you picked up the phone!”
In my four years at school, that Thanksgiving eve was the only time I did.
