Fifty Years Ago Today

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.