The year was 1957. My husband, Lee, was discharged from the Army and accepted a school music teaching position in the small town of Garrison, N.D., population 1,800.
It was unseasonably warm in mid-January when we left Lawton, Okla., where Lee had been stationed and where our first child, Patricia, was born. Now she was 3½ months old and would have nothing to do with the car bed we had purchased. She screamed when she was put in it, and holding her was much easier than listening to her screaming. One or the other of us held her the entire trip.
The trip took us 3½ days. Watching the weather change, the thermometer drop and snow start to fall was not especially encouraging. Of course, we knew it would be very cold in North Dakota, but this was more than we had expected.
At one point, we saw large truck tracks, and Lee thought it a good idea to follow in the tracks, because the snow was coming so hard. It worked well for us until we saw the tracks going off the side of the road, and there was the big rig, stranded, down at a lower level. The poor truck driver would not be going anywhere for some time.
We continued at a slower speed and finally reached the next town. We found a motel, and when Lee went in to see if there was a vacancy the clerk asked, “Where did you come from?” When he told her, she replied, “But that highway’s been closed for two hours!” Apparently ours was the last car through. We were very grateful to have gotten through, and also for finding an available room. I was also grateful for Lee’s experience with driving on ice-covered roads. I was a much newer driver and had never tackled an icy road.
When we arrived in Garrison, N.D., it was 40 degrees below zero. The expression “40 below” is often used when cold is extreme, but it truly was 40 degrees below zero.
We stopped and asked a woman who was just getting out of her car if she could tell us where we would find the school district superintendent, and she said: “Oh, you must be Mr. Jennings!” We both thought, wow, this is a very small town indeed. She was secretary to the superintendent.
The high school was quite new, as the original school had burned down and been replaced. The students loved the new choir teacher and the girls thought he was cute. (They were right about that!) The boys wanted him to prove himself by challenging him to a wrestling match, so he took the challenge and proved that he could wrestle by pinning the first student rapidly, and then the next one, which gained him a great deal of respect.
After two years in Garrison, there was a problem with financing the school, so one of the two music teachers had to go. The band teacher had seniority, having been there five months longer than Lee, so we had to go.
It was not really difficult. For me, it had been lonely. We lived in a basement apartment and seldom had visitors. As a new mother, I had no one but a small baby to talk to. I loved her dearly but she was not much of a conversationalist!
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