Madly in Love

In the spring of 1939, I was working in Shannon Hospital as secretary to the business manager when I looked up from my typing. There stood Quasimodo—smiling at me and even remembering my name from when we had met in high school. He had finished two years in med. school in Galveston, and though there was no summer job for him at my hospital, love blossomed that day and we were madly in love.

The year that James had spent at the University of Minnesota after I had first met him must have been a difficult one. He had borrowed money from Miss Woolworth, a local spinster who helped lots of young people go to college.

The Depression had hit the Benton family, and that school money was gone before he got to Minnesota. Another friend’s uncle lived in Minnesota, and he allowed James to live in a rather primitive garage apartment without adequate heat.

I don’t really know how he made it through that year. He didn’t have warm enough clothes for the brutally cold weather there, but he was determined and made good grades.

At that time, four years of college were not necessary for entering Medical School. Just the proper courses, and he got those in his two-year stint at San Angelo Junior College and the nine months in Minnesota. That was quite a feat in itself.

As James and I would take long walks together, he’d sing to me in a voice very much like the voice that I’ve heard from our son Jim over the years. I remember walking down the street with James on the way to a movie. He began to sing some love song LOUDLY, and I was a bit embarrassed!

One of the movies we saw together was “The Wizard of Oz.” On the newsreel that night, they were showing Hitler and war-boding messages.

But that was far away.

James had begun smoking at San Angelo JC, I think. He eventually became a chain-smoker. His brother, Roddy also smoked and so did his father, Daddy Bent. Daddy Bent mainly chewed on a cigar.

No one I knew chewed tobacco.