(Editor’s note: Did you catch last week’s story by “Vancouver City Manager for a Day” Eugene Nordstrom? The following adds a later chapter to that story.)
The last thing I wanted as a college student, at age 20, was a family cruise vacation to Alaska. However, my summer job did not start until the cruise would be over, so off I went. My brother had just received his doctorate from Stanford University and I don’t think he was excited about the cruise either; he was hoping for a new car as a graduation gift.
(I realize now that my parents thought that this would be our last family vacation as my brother and I began our own lives, so it was probably important to them.)
We had been on a cruise on the same ship, the Meteor, the year before to the Caribbean. The ship was formerly Greek King Constantine’s, so it was large for a personal yacht but small for a cruise ship. The demographics of the passengers were completely different than our first Meteor cruise. In the Caribbean, a swinging crowd enjoyed evening drinks on the fantail and danced long into the night. On the Alaskan cruise, at least it seemed to me, everyone was about 80 years old except my brother, myself, a young couple taking a delayed honeymoon (they were not happy with the elderly crowd), and a young man a bit older than me. It was not a lively group.
On the deck of the Meteor, I was admiring the view just out of Ketchikan, when the young man came out and said, “Isn’t this beautiful scenery?” He introduced himself as Gene. As the cruise progressed, we enjoyed occasional conversations and even a walk in the rain in Wrangell. I learned that Gene chose the Alaska trip because he had listened to the adventures of Sgt. Preston and Yukon King on the radio as a child. Gene had even sent in box tops for a deed to 1 square inch of land in the Yukon. So for him, the trip was the call of the wild, the beautiful and untamed wilderness.
We all took a side excursion, a train ride up the gold rush Chilkoot Trail to the Yukon, from Skagway to Lake Bennett, for an Alaskan moose-meat dinner. Gene kept all of us laughing with his comic observations. That is when I fell in love with him.
One of the cruise activities was “The Orange Dance,” which consisted of balancing an orange under our chins between our necks without the use of hands, passing it back and forth, while dancing. Gene and I were paired for this and had fun managing to keep the orange going between us rather than landing on the floor.
Once, when Gene returned to his cabin in his robe from the showers down the hall, he found my mother listening at his door. He said, ” Is there something I can do for you?” Mortified, she responded, “I am looking for my daughter, have you seen her?” I guess she thought that I was in Gene’s cabin, and did not want me taken advantage of by a man who might have had dubious moral character!
The cruise came to an end too quickly. I returned to University of the Redlands in Southern California, and Gene returned to his position as a psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Portland. We wrote letters for more than a year. When I was about to take off for a nutrition program at the University of California at Berkeley, I discovered that Gene had enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. So I would be going north as he was coming south.
Gene commuted many weekends to Berkeley. We were soon engaged, but waited to get married until Gene finished his doctoral program and I graduated. We celebrated our 25th anniversary with an Alaskan cruise. We just celebrated our 45th anniversary.
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