CHAPTER 6. VIGNETTES (Continued)

Today I am continuing to paste the short vignettes that I included in my memoirs.  I am only one story, and it is entitled "My Date With Betty".  After reading this story, I am sure that you will think that I am 1 beer short of a 6-pack.  Not the swiftest kid on the block.  I hope you enjoy reading it.

MY DATE WITH BETTY (1961).  In late 1961, I was a member of Sigma Nu fraternity.  During the fall, we would have football rallies ending with a bonfire.  I owned the cutest little car, an Austin Healy Sprite.  During the parade to the bonfire, I was in the parade with my Sprite and 2 girls sitting on the back.  The parade had stopped stopped,  and I heard a girl standing as a spectator say, “Hi, Sam”.  I looked and there was the cutest little redhead smiling at me.  She looked familiar, but I didn’t know who she was.  The parade continued on to the bonfire.  While there, the same redhead came up to me, and we started talking to each other.  I didn’t know her name, and at this time, I didn’t have the nerve to ask her.  In our conversation, she mentioned that someone had referred to her as “Betty”.  Hurray!  I now knew her first name.  I asked her to come back to my fraternity and join our party.  She did, and we had a great time.  I asked her for a date for the next night after the football game, and she said yes.
I laid in my bunk that night thinking about how well this had turned out.  Then a horrible thought truck me!  I didn’t know her last name!  How was I going to pick her up at her dormitory?  The policy at URI was to go to the dorm, go to the front desk, and ask for the girl you wanted to see, by name.  I knew that the dorm she resided in had several hundred residents.  I only knew her as Betty.
The next day, I frantically started to call my high school friends to see if anyone knew her.  After many calls, one, my good friend Hank Dugan,  said it could be Betty Brousseau, but he wasn’t sure.
That night, I went to her dorm to pick her up.  I went to the front desk and asked for Betty Brousseau.  The lady at the desk said the only Brousseau living there was named Elizabeth.  Betty could be a nickname for Elizabeth, and I asked the lady to call her.  You can’t imagine how nervous I was when I saw the legs of a girl appear on the stairway coming down.  Much to my relief, it was my Betty.  Hank, bless his heart, had been right.
Betty and I dated several more times during the fall until the Christmas break.  We were hitting it off pretty well, and I know we enjoyed each other’s company.  We only lived a few miles apart in our hometowns away from the university.  I asked her for a date during the upcoming Christmas break.
The date night was during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.  I went to her house to pick her up, and I met her father for the first time.  He strongly instructed me to bring Betty back by no later than 11:00.  I believe that he was an officer in the air force, so I said “Aye, Aye, Sir”. 
The horror movie “Psycho” had just come out and was scaring the pants off movie goers all over the country.  I took her to see Psycho, and we both had our pants scared off.  We arrived back from the movie close to her house at about 10:00.  I knew of an abandoned mill close by that was down a small dirt road.  That, combined with the movie we just saw, afforded us a scary place where we could “talk”.  At about 10:45 or so, we knew that we had to leave to get her home before the 11:00 deadline.  What I had not considered was that the dirt road had a thin layer of ice on it, and it had a slight grade downward toward the abandoned mill.  My little Austin Healy Sprite had no weight in the back, and therefore, it had little traction on the icy road.  I tried to turn the car around to go up the hill.  But the rear wheels spun, and I skidded off the road.  I tried all kinds of things to get the car realigned on the road.  I found wood boards to put under the wheels.  I used sticks and branches as well.  Finally, I got the car back on the road and headed in the right direction.  But the rear wheels would only spin on the ice.  I asked Betty if she knew how to drive a stick shift car.  She told me the answer that I did not want to hear.  “No”.  I gave her a quick lesson on how to use the clutch and to shift gears.  When she was ready, I got in back of the car to push and told her to drive.  We did get the car moving slowly.  With the tires spinning wildly, it moved and finally hit ice free dirt.  On the ice-free dirt, the Sprite suddenly lurched forward at a high rate of speed.  With Betty behind the wheel, the car sped up the remainder of the dirt road and went flying across the ensuing paved road.  The car hit the opposite curb and stalled.  We were both catatonic at this point, especially Betty.  Her house was less than 5 minutes from us, but by then it was about 12:30.  I was and hour and a half past the deadline given to me by her scary father. 

Figure 21.  1958 Austin Healy Sprite (See figure 21 below).  I had many adventures in this car.

When we arrived at her house, her father greeted us at the door.  We told him that we had a flat tire, but he bought none of that lame excuse.  He told Betty to go to her room, and he saw me to the door.
When we returned back to URI the next week, I called Betty to ask her for a date.  She said that her father had forbidden her to see me again.  I said that he was back in Lincoln, R.I., and we were here in Kingston, 30 miles away.  But she was obedient to her father, and we never dated again.  Our paths did cross several times on the campus, and I knew she was sorry about how things had turned out that fateful night.

FIGURE 20.  1958 AUSTIN HEALY SPRIT