Friday, November 20, 1970
I was twenty, an electrical engineering student in my junior year living in Townsend Hall of the Illinois Street Residence Halls at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It was a Friday night. I never took Friday nights off from studying. Saturdays I took off. My logic was that if I wanted to get into graduate school I had to keep my grades up. But this Friday night was different. It would change my life forever. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.
I had a date.
I hadn’t dated in college except for a one-off now and then
but nothing I can actually remember. Now don’t get me wrong, I was not a total
nerd…well, I guess I was but I had dated a lot in high school so I knew the
drill.
There was this girl that I had met at Engineering Council
meetings and events. You see, she was also a junior in engineering and was
studying Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering (now referred to as
Aerospace Engineering) … maybe studying to be a Rocket Scientist for all I knew.
What I did know is that she was of Italian descent, had long
curly hair, always wore miniskirts, was president of The Society of Women
Engineers, was taking flight lessons at Willard Airport, and lived in the
sister dorm to Townsend Hall, Wardall Hall. Hence, we shared a cafeteria and I
had been watching her for a couple of years because I knew she was one of the
very few women studying engineering. You could pretty well count the females in
the engineering class of 1972 on one hand.
We all knew, or at least we thought we knew, that a good-looking
female engineer would be hard to get a date with because they must be totally
booked up since they would be the only girl in all their classes. What I failed
to factor into my equation was that those guys in all her classes were also
introverted engineering nerds who were too afraid to ask the females on a date.
Well, earlier that week I walked home with her back to our
dorm from an Engineering Council meeting and asked her, through what I am sure
was a mouth of cotton, if she would go to a movie with me on Friday night. She
said yes. If we talked about anything else after that I have no recollection.
As it does, Friday finally rolled around and I studied the
Daily Illini to see what was playing in the local theaters. I decided that
nothing in Campus Town at the CO-ED Theater was anything I hadn’t already seen
but the film On a Clear Day You Can You
Can See Forever starring Barbra Streisand was playing at the Cinema in
downtown Urbana. That was about a mile away by shanks’ ponies so it would not
be a bad walk since it was a nice day. You could say it was a clear day.
To be frank, I also knew that she owned a 1970 Buick Skylark
which she parked next to Townsend Hall and, maybe with women’s lib and all
that, she might volunteer to drive once she heard that we had to walk to the
movie. That didn’t happen for reasons that I will not go into. But I will say
that she had not had a good day and she seemed to be a bit emotionally fragile
or she was scared of me, one of the two.
So … we got to the theater, most likely way too early, that
being my style, got our requisite popcorn and Cokes and found good seats. The
movie was really good. I had seen the musical a few years earlier at the
Shubert Theater in Chicago so knew what to expect but I don’t believe that she
had. I was a little concerned that she might not like musical theater but I
learned that evening that she was really into it. She had had about ten years
of dance as a youngster. I knew nothing about dance but understood music which
she had not been trained in. This actually made us very compatible. It gave us
something to talk about.
After the movie we walked over to the Pizza Hut on
University Avenue which was kind of on our way back to the dorm but not really. We didn't order spaghetti like Lady and Tramp did but we had a pork topping and mushroom thin crust pizza and Cokes (I was now
wired) and analyzed the movie. It seemed clear to me that we had a lot in
common and that might warrant the possibility of another date.
On the walk back to the dorm up Lincoln Avenue I got really forward
and took her hand, she didn’t jerk it away so that, too, boded optimistic for
the possibility of another date. We got back to Wardall, after they locked the
boys out of the Wardall lounge, so we said our goodbyes at the elevator. I
floated back to my room.
The next day I called and asked if she would go with me to
the Dizzy Gillespie concert on Sunday night in the Krannert Center’s Great
Hall. She said she would so I quickly bought two tickets. I must have been the
last to buy tickets because we ended up in the last row of the balcony. The
truth is, I knew I wanted to go to that concert but didn’t want to buy two
tickets in advance in case the Friday night date was a bust. I was not made of
money.
The Dizzy Gillespie concert was definitely one to write home
about and so was the date.
Pamela Jean Calvetti married me almost exactly eighteen
months later and we have been that way for 48.5 years.
The lines from On A
Clear You Can See Forever seem almost prescient:
That the glow of your being
Outshines every star
You'll feel part of
Every mountain, sea, and shore
You can hear from far and near
A world you've never, never heard before
And on a clear day
On that clear day
You can see forever, and ever, and ever
And ever more
Afterword:
It is unfortunate that selfies were not a common thing back then because we don’t have pictures of us together until March of 1971 at Saint Pat’s Ball. She was knighted that year. You can see from the photo that I had a great color sense and was clearly telling the photographer how to properly use my camera. Pam, of course, was radiant.
