Memories of My Parents, Married 72 Years Ago
My parents got hitched 72 years ago today.
They married Saturday afternoon on May 30, 1953, at Christ the King Catholic Church in Concord, New Hampshire. Carl Bradford Borders (called Brad) wore his Navy dress blues. He would turn 21 two months later. Grace Adrian Bourque (nicknamed Mickey for reasons never fully disclosed but likely related to her days partying in Boston while attending nursing school) wore white. She was 23.
The wedding photo shows the couple on the steps of the church’s entrance, a young girl peering up at them from behind a tall wooden door. It is a precious photo, reminiscent of a Henri Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment.”
They met in Boston on a blind date. My mom was studying to be a nurse in the city where she was born, but she was raised in Concord. My dad’s naval destroyer, the USS Norris, had been damaged while on patrol with the 7th Fleet during the Korean War. It was docked at Boston Harbor Shipyard for repairs. He had joined the service after graduating from high school in Willow Springs, Missouri, though he was largely raised in Caspar, Wyoming. He trained as a radar operator and told me more than once that he joined the Navy to see the world — and did.
My future parents first settled outside Concord in a small house across the road from the Contoocook River. My dad worked in a tannery while attending community college on the GI Bill to become a commercial artist. I still recall how rank he smelled coming home after his shift in that wretched place. My mom worked as a nurse at Concord Hospital, where I became their firstborn child just more than two years after they wed.
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An aside: My earliest memory, when I was around 3, is playing with a toy truck in the aisle of an airplane headed from Boston to Dallas, peering up at the legs of the passengers. We were heading to visit my Texas grandparents in Longview. Brother Scott was an infant. Little brother Gregg was a half-dozen years away from being born. That is the only memory I retained of my first time in Texas.
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After my dad received his associate’s degree from New Hampshire Technical Institute, my parents bought a house in Allenstown —a small town nearly equidistant at 10 miles from Concord, the capital, and Manchester, then and now the state’s largest city. He found work as a commercial artist in Concord, primarily doing screen printing but also painting signs. I loved visiting his workplace, with its exotic smells of ink and chemicals, the huge lithographic camera, the darkroom where the film to be adhered to a silk-screen frame was processed. It possibly propelled me into becoming a newspaper photographer by 15. That led me to a lifelong career in journalism, in which I still dabble more than half a century later.
Our childhood home, 27 Valley Street, was tiny and bizarrely built — even through a kid’s eyes. It had two tiny bedrooms, a single bathroom, and a minuscule living room. A door in the bathroom led down to the dirt cellar that flooded if it rained hard. At least once a year, my mom and I would operate the sump pump and suck out the water while my dad was at work, and a storm raged. That dank cellar scared me. I worried something would come through the cellar door while I was in there conducting my bathroom business. I kept my eyes steady on that door.
None of the doorways was quite plumb at 27 Valley Street. The walls and ceiling didn’t meet perpendicularly. The best feature was the funky old barn converted into my dad’s art studio, heated by an actual Franklin woodstove. I once jumped off the roof of the dilapidated chicken coop on the back of the barn into a tall snowdrift, which didn’t break my fall. I impaled my foot on a nail in a board on the ground. My mom was not pleased. I received the first of many tetanus shots. The chicken coop was torn down the following spring.
We built a treehouse in the sugar maple out back, which was popular with the neighborhood kids. From the treehouse, we could watch the dairy cows grazing in the pasture behind our house, a farm owned by a kind widow. In winter, we grabbed our cheap skis and practiced on the modest hill in the widow’s pasture. Once, my dad and I tapped the sugar maple, hoping to get enough sap to make maple syrup — a New England staple. We were not successful.
My mother stayed home to take care of us boys after Scott was born, two-and-a-half years after me. My parents would have been considered working-class poor. I’m not sure that label existed in the early 1960s. Discussions of how to stretch a dollar often came at the dinner table. My grandfather owned a Shell station a few blocks from the state capitol in Concord. He generously let my parents fill up whatever well-used car they owned at the time.
The most memorable vehicle was a white Ford Falcon, fairly new when purchased. Its exterior began to rust after the first Granite State winter, from the road salt used in a largely unsuccessful attempt to keep highways clear. My dad used Bondo to repair the decayed patches, then primed them with a rust-colored paint. The Falcon looked as if it had contracted a massive case of chicken pox. They finally traded it for a turquoise-ish Mercury Comet. It was a step up.
New Hampshire’s economy was sputtering in 1968, at least for my parents. They decided to move to Longview, Texas. My dad made modestly more money, and we boys grew up and supported ourselves, easing their financial pressure.
There’s more to this story, as there is to anyone’s story. I’ll end here, quietly celebrating my parents, who died in 2009 (Brad) and 2011 (Mickey), here in Longview.
I sure miss you guys.
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