Terry Marshall - A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties

Sandra Jonas Publishing

PO Box 20892

Boulder, CO 80308

sandrajonaspublishing.com

Copyright 2021 by Terry Marshall and Ann Garretson Marshall

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews.

Cover illustration: Adobe Stock/Fresh Stock

Book and cover design: Sandra Jonas

Maps: Cynthia Carbajal

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marshall, Terry, author. | Marshall, Ann Garretson, author.

Title: A Rendezvous to Remember : A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties / Terry Marshall and Ann Garretson Marshall.

Description: Boulder, Colorado : Sandra Jonas Publishing, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020944339 | ISBN 9781733338622 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781733338653 (paperback) | ISBN 9781733338677 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Marshall, Ann Garretson. | Marshall, Terry. | Political activistsBiography. | Man-woman relationships. | Nineteen sixties. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Social activists

Classification: LCC CT275 .M377 2021 | DDC 973.92092 dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020944339

All photographs courtesy of the authors.

v1.1

To Jack Sigg,
who profoundly influenced both our lives

Contents

Goodbye, Boulder

Terry

Thursday, 4 June 1964, Boulder, Colorado. In the final hours before Annie left for Europe, I was her faithful domestique. Grabbing up pages of her final term paper in progress, I raced by bicycle from her dorm, pumped uphill to her professors office, deposited her prose, and flew back for another installment, and then another. Three trips in all. We met the noon deadline by minutes.

No lunch. Instead, I lugged her stuff out and arrayed it all on the sidewalk like a garage sale: garment bags, sacks of whatnots, boxes of books, boots, and shoes, a battered Smith-Corona portable typewriter, the AM/FM radio I gave her for graduation, bundles of letters tucked into their envelopesall postmarked APO, all from her lieutenant waiting in Germanyas well as a carton of top secret reel-to-reel audiotape musings from the same guy.

I wedged the whole mess into her mothers Oldsmobile, as expertly as if I were a Machu Picchu stone mason. I couldnt have squeezed in so much as a toothpick.

We were left with a three-foot-high pile of Denver Post newspapers, months worth that Annie hadnt read. Ill read them in Albuquerque, she said. I paid for them. She scrounged up rope and bundled them to the roof of the car. No biggie. Its like strapping on gear for a campout.

But for a five-hundred-mile trip at sixty-five miles an hour? I simply shook my head.

Goodbye, Ter. Her hand grazed my arm. No hug. No kiss. No tears. Certainly not with Mother Garretson beside her, pretending not to monitor our every move.

Have a great trip, I managed to say.

As they drove away, I slumped onto the steps of Hallett Hall. The first newspaper fluttered free as they passed the planetarium, well before they hit the Denver-Boulder Turnpike.

We had created lots of memories here, Annie and I, all over campus, all over Boulder: those fifteen-cent burgers (for Annie, ketchup only), ten-cent fries, and spirited debates in my Ford Falcon parked at McDonalds on Sunday nights; that warm spring night when we dashed from Hallett Hall into the rain, skipping through puddles and laughing like four-year-olds, she sparkly eyed, even after the shower had soaked her curly hair into a rag mop; that fall weekend when she and two friends squeezed into my car after dinner and we drove all night to watch our Colorado Buffaloes play the Jayhawks in Kansas. She dozed through the game, despite raucous fans and unforgiving bleachers. We lost 346.

Throughout our early college years, Annie had been my best friend. The girl-next-door kind of friend. The friend I could meet for coffee on the spur of the momentno shower, shave, or ironed shirt needed. The everyday friend who swapped tales with me from the books wed read and news wed heard. The friend who consoled me when my father was killed. The first person I called when the Peace Corps invited me to go to Venezuela.

Those were our old buddy years, 19601963, before the 1964 March winds blew the cobwebs out of my brain and I realized Annie was a girla captivating one.

Take last weekend (Friday night, May 29, to be exact). I converted my room into a photo studioflood lamps, reflectors, a bouquet of flowers, borrowed bedspread, fluffy throw pillowsand coaxed her into wearing her nightie for a photo shoot. No big deal, I said. Wed shot dozens of pictures of each other for our photojournalism class, capturing close-ups in different moods and different thoughts and experimenting with shadows and light. Wed posed like nature lovers at Varsity Lake and big-time reporters at our typewriters.

Still, it took some cajoling. I want to print a bunch of eleven-by-fourteens and mount them on my headboard, I told her. That way, Ill finally get to sleep with you. Every night.

She glared, but a grin slowly formed. Okay, if its The Clothed Maja you want me to model and not that au naturel one youre always raving about.

Annie in her nightie. Wow. A silky, ivory-colored midthigh number slit up both sides to her hips, clinging so suggestively it advertised every curve and hill. We did well for an hour or so, but when she put on those come-hither looks of hers and swished her fanny? Well, I lost my focus. She did too. We didnt go all the way. She was unbending on that score. But that was a night Id never forget.

Now she was on her way to Germany to see her West Point lieutenant, my competitor, the guy who mailed her reams of letters, hours of tape-recorded sweet nothings, and fancy gifts I couldnt match, like the hand-blown German crystal vase I had packed so carefully into her mothers car.

It didnt help that they had spent so little time together. She didnt know his foibles and annoying habits. Surely he had some. Annie knew me, thoughevery fiery outburst, every dirty little secretdown to the graphic intimacies of my past relationships. Worse, I had gotten so wrapped up in the joy of sex that Id pestered Annie to take on a lover of her own (not me, by the wayI was myopic in those days). I couldnt wait for her to experience it for herself.

One thing was clear: I was in a bare-knuckle bout with one Lieutenant Jack Sigg for Annies heart. And he wore the champions belt. I was an amateur, better suited for a round with a sparring partner than a go at the title. Having never met him, I was flailing about in the dark. He was a shadowy phantom like those CU jocks who dominated the headlines but popped up on campus only on game days. I did know of his tight friendship with Annies older brother. And Id seen a photo. Jack was a stud.

Not only that, the lieutenant had the whole United States Army on his side. Annies family was military to the core. By contrast, I was in a battle with my draft board to be classified I-O, Conscientious Objector. I couldnt take a human life, I had told them in a letter, nor could I support a country that did. Id pledged to myself I would go to prison before Id go into the army. The board sent me a new draft card, stamped II-S, Student Deferment. I was sure they would reclassify me I-A, Available for Military Service and snatch me up the moment I graduated. In two days.

That, too, was a slap in the face. Annie was so hot to get to Germany she wouldnt even stick around for commencement. Mine and hers.

As if all that werent bad enough, Annie and the lieutenant were about to travel Europe together in the hottest car on the road: a 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. They would have weeks alone. And I knew how sensual Annie could be. What if he picked up where Id left off, leaving me to choke in his exhaust?