On Christmas Eve, 1942, I went up to Englewood to join the Newhalls at the home of David's cousin Carol Burrowes. The love and joy that filled her home were particularly moving to a stranger far from his home. During the celebration I discovered that Carol was planning to come down to Princeton on Jan. 8 to interview for a job with the Princeton Bank. I invited her to have dinner with me that evening.

When I met her on the train platform at Princeton, we moved toward each other and both of us had the impulse to hug each other. But such a public demonstration of affection was not appropriate at the time, according to our standards of propriety, so we stopped short.

After a candlelight supper at a local inn, we picked up a seminary classmate who had a date with a girl in Trenton, and spent the evening there at her home. After dropping off my classmate at the seminary, Carol and I sat in my unheated car in front of the Newhalls' apartment and discussed what young people now call their "relationship." I confessed that if Carol took the bank job and didn't want to see a lot more of me, I would appreciate knowing this to avoid mutual embarrassment. She indicated that seeing more of me would not be a burden, and one thing led to another until we decided to become engaged.

Later on, we joked that Carol made this reckless commitment only to escape from the cold. Strange as it might seem to a younger generation, we were not locked in a warm embrace during this romantic discussion, but sitting primly side by side.

More than two weeks later, after Carol had accepted the bank offer, I broke the news to my family. After discussing my seminary grades and the weather, I proclaimed that "at last I've met the girl of my dreams: Carol Burrowes, David Newhall's cousin. You may remember that I spent Christmas weekend with them, and I mentioned the fact that Carol was coming down here a couple weekends later, in the last letter I wrote. Well, Friday night of that weekend it sort of came out in the conversation that we loved each other, so there we were. This may seem awfully sudden and rather fantastic to you, and it was somewhat of a surprise to me I must confess, because I was painfully aware of the fact that I was in no position to do anything about the lovely dreams I'd been keeping to myself for some time. However, sometimes the most obvious common sense doesn't turn out to be the best common sense, and after I've explained a few things the situation may not sound so impossible after all."

The letter went on to report that Carol had been in our home as a girl of 14 when she was taken to a church party in our Berkeley home by David Newhall's older brother Luther. As she remembered it, Luther had left her to fend for herself as soon as they arrived, and she spent most of the evening watching from the sidelines. I didn't remember meeting her then, because the party was for my older brother's group, and I was probably upstairs as a social exile. But after we had become engaged, she found a reference to the party in the diary she had kept that year. She told me this while we were eating in a restaurant, and on the paper napkin she drew from memory a diagram of our living room in Berkeley, where she sat during the party, feeling very lonely. If I had "crashed" the party, I would probably have been too inept socially to have helped the situation.

During the Spring of 1943, our wedding plans gradually evolved. The seminary had no apartments for married students and official policy discouraged marriage until a student was ready to take a church position, at which time he was usually expected to have a bride ready to join him as an unpaid assistant or at least as a gracious and respectable homemaker.

Union Seminary, on the other hand, had a modern apartment building for married students, and provided financial aid to them. I was also more attracted to Union from an academic standpoint.

The Princeton faculty still seemed to be intimidated by the memories of a messy heresy trial which centered around a professor named Machen, who had left the seminary because he claimed the faculty were not orthodox enough, and had started a rival seminary in Philadelphia.

In reaction, the Princeton faculty seemed to be trying doubly hard to show how "sound" their teaching was.

At Union, on the other hand, the faculty had gone through a similar ordeal, and the dominant professor at the time was Reinhold Niebuhr, a former "liberal" who was proclaiming what was called "neo orthodoxy." Also on the faculty was Paul Tillich, a refugee from Nazi Germany who was trying to interpret the Christian message in philosophical terms. All in all, the faculty seemed much sharper intellectually and the academic climate seemed more appealing to me than Princeton's.

So Carol and I decided to be married on Sept. 4 (1943) and start our married life at Union Seminary. She landed a job as secretary to the chairman of the Social Studies department at Teacher's College, Columbia U., located a few blocks from the seminary. She began working there about the time the seminary year ended in May, and went home to live until the wedding.

During the summer I worked at Camp Belle Mead again. This time I was assigned to a crew which stenciled addresses on the crates of material being shipped to military units overseas. The addresses were in code, so we could not tell where they went. But later I surmised from various bits of information that many of the crates we had to handle were pipe fittings destined for desert areas of the Middle East. They were certainly heavy, at any rate. Between the hard work and my efforts to economize on living expenses, my weight went down to 160 pounds. Thanks also to my bride's cooking, the suit in which I was married soon became much too small!

One of my mother's concerns when we were making wedding plans was that I should spend a suitable amount to buy Carol's engagement ring. Then, knowing how little I had to spend on anything, she sent me the gold watch her grandfather had given to her grandmother, which had a small diamond in the back of the case. I took the watch to a jeweler in Trenton and had the diamond set in an engagement ring. (Later we had it incorporated into Carol's wedding ring, and the diamond was replaced in the watch by another stone).

In July we got the sad news that my brother Dick had contracted polio at Scout camp, which meant among other things that my mother could not attend our wedding, as she had planned to do.

We also learned that the Burrowes' pastor, Carl Elmore, would be on vacation until after our wedding date. My former Scoutmaster and Religious Education Director at St. John's, Williston Wirt, had been an important influence in my life, and I discovered that his brother Sherwood was in Princeton for a summer study course, so we asked him to officiate. (Sherwood later became editor of Billy Graham's "Decision" magazine). My first year seminary roommate Wendell Wollam was best man, and Carol's cousin Catherine Newhall Garrett was matron of honor.

Our wedding was conducted in the little Reformed Church next to the Burrowes' house, because gas rationing was so tight in the East that wedding guests were not allowed to drive from the site of a wedding to another location for the reception.

The reception was held in the yard between the church and the Burrowes home. My only California friends, besides Wendell Wollam, were old friend Kenneth Davis, who was in the East on business, and seminary friend Bob Staley. Bob later became Minister of Christian Education at St. John's, Berkeley, several years after I had that job.

After the reception, Carol's father drove us into New York City, where we had a reservation at the Prince George Hotel. On the way he said solemnly that he hoped we would have a long and happy life together. In the euphoria of the moment, I said flippantly that I was giving it at least a month. I often wished later that he could have lived to see how fruitfully his hopes came true.

The next morning we went to Penn Station to take the train to Waterboro Center, Maine, where the Taylors, friends of the Burrowes family, had a summer home. At the ticket counter we had trouble cashing a check from my grandmother McCabe which was made out to Robert and Carol DeWolf. Carol had no identification as the new Mrs. DeWolf, because at that time New Jersey did not issue a marriage form for the bride and groom which they could take with them, and we did not think to get one from the minister. However, the clerk must have decided we looked like newlyweds and he cashed the check.

We arrived in Waterboro Center late at night, and were taken by a local friend of the Taylors to our honeymoon house. It had been built before the Civil War for Helen Taylor's clergyman grandfather, and the family had kept it very much the same except for installing electricity on the ground floor.

Our first breakfast there was eaten about 3:00 p.m. after I had chopped wood for the stove and Carol improvised a meal of sorts from the meagre supplies in the house. The bed upstairs had rope springs and the only illumination was candlelight, but it proved to be a great setting for a honeymoon. We also went skinny dipping late one night in the pond at the center of the village, and walked around in the daytime enjoying the Fall color and the quietness of the woods.

Our only venture out of town was taking a bus which picked up and delivered workers to the shipyard at Portland. The bus stayed only 15 minutes there before returning, but it was a change of scene, and of course everything Carol and I did together seemed exciting.

Back in New York, the Fall schedule was crowded with my school work, Carol's job, and my new "field work" job as youth director for the Central Methodist Church in Yonkers. To get there, we had to take the subway to the end of the line, then a trolley on to Yonkers. The whole trip took an hour unless we missed connections and it was longer.

The Methodists did not approve of the youth minister smoking, so I was usually torn between hoping the trolley connection would be quick so I could get to Yonkers sooner, and hoping there would be a delay so I could have a cigarette break.

As the year went on, the trips to Yonkers became more tedious in several respects. The minister, Dr. Wilson, had sold the congregation on the idea of having a youth minister in the desperate hope that this would stem the defection of young people to other churches or to secular pursuits. He was an older man whose health was precarious, and he probably hoped that having a seminary student would relieve his burdens in several ways.

However, one basic problem with the Yonkers youth group was that some of them were cousins or other close relatives to each other, and their domination tended to freeze others out, even though they were not malicious in this.

Early in the Fall, I discovered that the group had attempted under the previous counselors to produce a three act play, to raise money as well as to provide an activity. Because of my experience in drama, and with most of the cast still in the group, we decided to revive the project. This involved extra trips for rehearsals, but it did help to give vitality to the program.

The week before the play was to be given, one of the girls came down with a case of laryngitis which was probably more psychological than physical. She had not done well in rehearsals and missed several, and should have been replaced earlier. But her parents were among those in the congregation who had been critical of the pastor and were particularly protective of their daughter, so it was a very touchy situation.

Thus the laryngitis proved to be a blessing in disguise. One of the cousins, who had learned everybody's lines in the play during rehearsals, stepped into the part and the show went off very well. Afterward, I introduced to the audience the girl who had been replaced, as if she had been the heroine of the hour by graciously surrendering her role instead of trying to go on.

My seminary graduation came a few days earlier, on Wednesday, May 17. The ceremony was simple but very impressive to me, and it made me feel identified with Union even though we had spent only nine months there. The graduate who stood in line next to me, George William Edwards, had been featured in a TIME magazine article several weeks earlier because he was getting his seminary degree after being a Wall Street banker and chairman of the econ. department at CCNY. He got interested in the ministry when he took over the struggling Episcopal parish in his home city of Scarsdale. He confided to me that his biggest struggle was to be more democratic in dealing with his parishioners than in his business affairs. If some of my colleagues and "superiors" in the ministry had only learned this and practiced it more!

During our nine months at Union, Carol and I kept careful accounts, and we have the record to prove that our personal expenses were $900 for that period, thanks partly to help from the seminary on housing.

About the same time, I had my first experience with a Methodist annual meeting, then called a Fourth Quarterly Conference. The pastor was obviously uneasy, and my report on the youth program was hailed as one of the brighter notes in the meeting.

In his sermon on the Sunday before Dr. Wilson went off to his Annual Conference session, he blasted his critics and told why he was glad he would not be coming back to the church. But at Annual Conference, the Cabinet evidently wasn't able to come up with a better appointment, so he went back to Yonkers. His outburst evidently helped to clear the air, and he seemed to be well received on his return. At the time it never occurred to me I would ever get tied up with the Methodist appointment system.

The next big milestone was my ordination in the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City on June 12 (Monday). One of my classmates was a member of that church, and I was included in the proceedings so I would be a full fledged minister before leaving the East. At the time we had no plans beyond going back to California by train, because Carol had not met my family and friends (at least not as a bride). We assumed that I could make connections with a church somewhere after we made the trip.

The ordination featured a "Charge to the Candidates" by Dr. Robert Hastings Nichols. He was an elderly professor of church history whom I greatly admired as a teacher and as a Christian gentleman, and I felt honored to have him do this part of the service. My seminary colleague was dressed much more formally, but I decided to stick to my "civilian" suit, partly out of principle and partly because our funds were so limited.

We planned to spend the next week or so getting ready for our trip West. But almost immediately I came down with a "strep" infection and spent the next week or so in bed at the Burrowes' home.

But that wasn't the worst news of the week by any means.

On June 14, we got word that my father had been stricken with a heart attack while at work, as a civilian engineer with the Navy. The following Sunday was Father's Day, and I wrote him a letter aimed at cheering him up, and promising Carol and I would do all we could for him when we got to Oakland.

But he never got to read the letter, and I can imagine how my mother felt when she read it a few days later. For on June 17 he died. My mother called to give us the news, but I was too sick to talk, and Carol's family was wonderful in trying to comfort her and me. They held a private memorial service on the day the service was held in California. In retrospect, it seems all the more remarkable that my mother and Carol's mother were able to share their experiences at losing their husbands, and other experiences, when Carol's mother moved to Berkeley.