I had a crush on Bob Waldschmidt when I was in the 4th grade at Mt View, our one room country school in Grant County, Ok. I was extremely shy and so was he. I thought he might like me, but I was too shy to make any move his direction. Some would call it puppy love. He moved away to Kansas that year and I never saw him except for a couple of times after that. I often thought about him. My father wrote to him during WWII and I wrote a few times too. Just before he came home from WWII, he wrote to me and asked for a date, I really wanted to go out with him, but was going steady with another guy and declined. Many years after I married, Bob was in our community on business, and stopped to see me. I had been ill with a bad case of hives and was dressed in a loose fitting housecoat. My head was covered with hives which made my hair look like it was standing on end, and probably was from all of the head scratching I had done. When I answered the knock at the door and saw him standing there, I was so embarrassed. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. He still had beautiful dark brown eyes and curly black hair. He was well dressed in a suit and tan top coat. WOW! I stammered as I told him of my situation. He felt badly about my discomfort and offered advice as to how he coped with hives at one time. He said he ate a diet of only bacon, a remedy he got from a friend. After a couple of hours into our visit, our eldest daughter came home from school and I introduced him to her and the rest of our school age children then added that he was my first school girl crush. He told her how he was crazy about me at school too. And to think I never knew that. He told her that one time he tried to buy my box at our box supper. Some ornery boys had told him that an elderly woman's box was mine, so he ended up bidding and buying the wrong box. I remembered the incident plainly and had always assumed he did not care enough about me to buy my decorated box. After Bob left our home, April said “Mama, do you mean you actually let that guy get away”? Her daddy was and still is a handsome man too. This handsome man passed away a few years ago. I was ill and did not attend his funeral. It makes one wonder how differently things would have been if Bob and I had not been so shy or had I accepted his offer for a date back in 1945.

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Created December 26, 2020

Updated: 14 June, 2021

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