The Surprise Engagement

1973 – The Surprise Engagement

Connie, Jane, and Dottie - hiking around Cohoes Falls

It was 1973, the year the Watergate Trial began, the Vietnam War came to an end, and the year of the Roe vs Wade decision. It was the year Vice President Spiro T Agnew resigned over tax evasion, the Alaska Pipeline Bill was passed, and the speed limit was reduced to 55 mph. In sports, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the battle of the sexes, Secretariat won the triple crown, and a guy named George Steinbrenner bought the New York Yankees for a measly 12 million dollars. Notable movies were American Graffiti, The Sting, Enter The Dragon, The Exorcist and Woody Allen's Sleeper. Music of the year included Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon”, Led Zeppelin's “Houses of the Holy”, The Who's “Quadrophenia”, Elton John's “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, and Marvin Gaye's “Let's Get It On”. Gas was 40 cents a gallon, the average income stood around 12K, the median home price was 32.5K, but inflation was north of 6%.

I was in my second semester at HVCC. I was beginning to do research on colleges I might want to transfer to. One problem/constraint, I still had the Air Force Reserve commitment. I would need to stay relatively nearby to allow me to get to the Reserve base in Schenectady one weekend a month for another year. I would be graduating from Hudson Valley (HVCC) at the end of the semester. The options were to either transfer to a school for the coming fall reasonably close to Schenectady or wait for a year and transfer to a school where I really wanted to be. I found a book called the Underground Guide to College or something like that. It had information on campus life such as activities, politics, the make up of the student population, and the prevailing culture. I was looking for a decent sized school that had at least a reasonable female to male ratio, and a significant counter culture element. I also was thinking that it would be nice to attend a school in a “college” town. The book came in very handy. My counselor at Hudson Valley thought I could get into some good schools in the east and was particularly touting Amherst as she thought that would be a good fit for me. That way I could start the coming fall. I put it on the list, but I was leaning more towards schools like the University of Colorado - Boulder, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, UC Berkeley, and the University of Oregon – Eugene, even if that meant waiting. Wisconsin made the list because I remembered the University had been a leader in the 60's protest movement. I'd always had good feelings about it and it had a beautiful campus. On the down side, it wasn't out West where I ultimately wanted to be. Boulder was on the list because it sounded like the kind of place I was looking for, similar to Eugene. It was out West but on the down side it was still far from the coast. Berkeley and Eugene were the front runners.

It was around this time that I became a vegetarian. I knew a couple in California who were vegetarians and had once stayed with them for a few days. I had been a big meat eater and had never really thought too much about it. I was under the naive and false impression that people went vegetarian because they were against killing animals. I knew nothing about the health angle, (“Everybody's got an angle” says Bing Crosby in White Christmas). I had asked them a lot of questions about it when I visited. My grandfather was going through what today we know as Alzheimer's but at that time it was just called “hardening of the arteries”, supposedly caused by too much fat in the diet, i.e. too much red meat among other things. The combination of being curious about what it would be like to give up meat with the challenge of successfully doing it and realizing I did not want to get what my Grandfather had drove me to give it a try. Originally I thought I'd do it for six months to a year and see how it went. Well, I sort of got hooked and ended up being a vegetarian for 25 years, but I eventually got over it.

In Dottie's previous relationships she had been the one in control, the one who made the decisions. When we got together she quickly realized that this would not be the case with me. I had just spent three years where others were deciding things for me. I was going to be independently making all my decisions. She seemed to like that. It was like she was glad to have someone else step up and take the lead. Consequently things generally went my way.

Now that I was free of the Air Force I was into having a good time. Dottie's college roommates would come and visit us. She had shared a quad with three women, Jane, Connie, and Sue. They were now out of college and back living at home. Visiting us was their chance to let loose. We'd party, smoking pot all day long, listening to music, telling stories, playing various games, and sometimes even go for a hike. We would usually throw a party when they came up inviting our friends from the Albany area. Dottie would always remind us to straighten up before the party so we wouldn't be wasted when the guests showed up. One time we were all sitting in the living room passing around a joint when Dottie came in and told us to stop. “No more pot until the party” were her instructions. So we sat there and decided to just roll a bunch of joints in preparation for the party. Well, we must have rolled 20 joints. Then we got up and did a few things. We returned to the living room and waited for the party to start. As soon as the first person showed up, it was our upstairs neighbor, we each picked up a joint and lit up. There was like 6 of us and we passed around 6 joints all at the same time. All six of us got totally wasted before the second guest arrived. We would have been better off just smoking a little here and there like we had been doing. It was one of the few times I saw Dottie get pissed at me.

Dottie was finishing up her Masters in PA (Public Administration) at Albany. She and I had been together for over a year now and she'd been bringing up the “M” word lately. She thought we should get married or or at least engaged. I was being resistant. I didn't feel I was ready to go down that path. Although I really liked Dottie and thought I loved her, I had no real desire to marry again. I liked things as they stood and was not anxious to get the families involved, which was how I saw marriage at that time. Besides, I'd already done that once even if it was without the families. I did not exactly express my concerns in quite that way to Dottie. As the semester wore down the subject began to show up more and more. One evening we stayed up talking about it well into the night. Dottie was asking me why not and pushing for a commitment and at one point she said “Can't you just think about it?” I finally said “Yes”. I thought I was saying yes to thinking about it. That's not the way Dottie heard it. She evidently heard yes to engagement. That was a Friday. The next day she decided to go down to Long Island to visit her parents for the weekend. She informed them that we were now engaged and also talked with my parents telling them the same thing. The next week our engagement announcement was in the Long Island paper. I found out about my engagement when someone wished me congratulations. Don't remember who, could have been my parents. This was indeed shocking news. I tried replaying our conversation in my head. I obviously had not been listening well enough. Ut-oh, now I was engaged and really did not want to be. I realized that I needed to correct this but Dottie had her Orals for her Masters coming up within a couple of weeks. She was excited about our engagement and told everyone who came over to the apartment. I decided I should wait to undo this until after her Orals. I didn't want to mess that up for her. Looking back I should have addressed this the moment I heard about it, but I didn't, I wussed out. Her Orals came and she passed and we had a party. The next week I told her that I was breaking the engagement. This did not go too well as you might expect. My parents were disappointed, especially my Dad. I remember him giving me one of those looks like “There you go being irresponsible yet again”. Heck, I looked like a flake to everyone. Well it may have looked bad but it was better than getting married when I didn't want to, or worse, to the wrong person. That's what I was telling myself anyway. Since I had let a few weeks go by before breaking the engagement it looked like I had just changed my mind. We decided to separate at least for awhile. Dottie stayed in the apartment and I found a place to stay over in Troy. I moved out and rented a room in a really cool old RPI frat house. The fraternity rented out their rooms for the summer. All the renters had their own room and everyone had access to the huge kitchen, dining and living area. It was a great place. I took a job for the summer at a bakery factory. I was disappointed that we separated but under the circumstances it was probably for the best. We figured we would work things out during the summer but it would be awhile before everything sorted itself out.

For those keeping score at home I now had one broken marriage and one broken engagement. I was now 24 and needed to figure out what I wanted to do about both college and Dottie. Trusting the old adage, “All things come to those who wait”, I decided to put off worrying too much about it until the end of the summer.