The Beginning Of A Love Story By Rick Bayko

Love, like Fortune, favours the bold. – E.A. Bucchianeri

Imagine you are a marathoner in New England before Frank Shorter won his official Olympic gold medal. You pay your $5 entry fee, show’em your AAU card and hope there is some beef stew left when you get to the finish. Imagine you love the sport so much, you open a running store and create a running magazine. You run more miles every year than some people drive their cars. I can relate to a guy like that.

Rick Bayko did a piece of writing. Not about running. There are other things in life.

Rick remembers being young and in love better than I do.

November 1969

Back in the USA, finishing up one of my first workouts at the Milk Street homestead. That’s Mike Fiene’s house with the Barracuda parked out front, back when it was still the McCollough’s house. And Agnes Collins’s house beside it. I used to mow the lawn and wash the windows for the dear old lady, and I say old, realizing full well I’m probably older now than she was then. On the right, I’m receiving a finishing award from Dick Fermoyle after one of my first races.

After escaping from Vietnam in October, 1969, the plane stopped briefly on Guam for refueling, then landed at Fort Lewis, Washington. After a few hours of processing out I was officially a civilian again, honorably discharged after only nineteen months of service. At Seattle-Tacoma Airport I could have taken a flight to Boston, then a bus to Newburyport to pick up my car. Instead I headed straight for Hartford, Connecticut, to find out if I really had a girlfriend or if I had just had a pen-pal.

While I can be downright pessimistic about a lot of things in life, my friends know me to sometimes be overly optimistic, or at least overly hopeful, about my prospects with the women with whom I fall in love.

Signals were mixed.

While I was still overseas, a friend spent a weekend with her. He then sent me an innuendo-laced letter that seemed almost gloating, warning me that I wasn’t the right man for her.

My birthday came up a few days after I got back and one of her gifts to me was a book, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Inscribed in part: “…perhaps in the years to come, when I have become a part of your past…..” Geez, slaughtering your chickens before they’re either hatched OR counted?

Then, the second time she brought me home to Milford, Connecticut, her mother took her aside to advise her, she was at an age when she really shouldn’t be dating guys she didn’t intend to marry. That her inscription later turned out to be, well, prophetic, didn’t matter at the time. It might have led someone more realistic to not expect too much. But I was with her, and I loved her, and she said she loved me, too. So, I dared to dream I could win her over for life.

For my birthday she also bought tickets to see The Who perform at The Bushnell in Hartford. We rocked to their energetic presentation of their rock opera “Tommy”, with Roger Daltry swinging the microphone like a lasso and Pete Townshend windmilling his guitar, leaping, and kicking his leg up over his microphone stand.

My ears are still ringing. It was great.

We left after the Tommy part but before they were done with the entire show because we both wanted to be alone for a while. We hugged, we kissed, and my raging hormones wanted more, more, more. But she was smart enough for the both of us and pointed out that pregnancy wouldn’t be a good idea just yet. I wanted her right then and there, badly, but I wanted her for the rest of my life even more. So, I suppressed and contained myself – Ooh, that was HARD! – and gave her the best kissing, and caressing, and cuddling I had to offer. I seem to remember the light of the dawn coming through a window, while I was still at it.

My clothes were inadequate for my new station in life, so Danalee had me buy some bell-bottomed jeans, a denim workshirt and a denim jacket. I was a non-conformist, just like everyone else.

When she got a couple of days off from nursing school and work, we hitchhiked up to Newburyport to get my car. We found out my mother was back in the hospital, this time at Anna Jaques in Newburyport and we went straight up to visit.

She was groggy, but she recognized me and the girl I had written about with whom I was in love. She seemed happy to see us both and called Danalee ‘Donna.’ When I tried to correct her, Dana stopped me, The nurse in her recognizing that a patient in my mother’s condition didn’t need even that much stress. We stayed for a while and she drifted off. She would never get the chance to call Danalee by her real name.

She died before the month was out, with five more tumors found in her brain when an autopsy was done. Only forty-four years old, having done nothing more risky with her health than to be a mother and have extraordinarily bad luck.

On the day my mother died, my grandmother called everyone when death looked imminent, but we were all too late.

I was at the hospital when my father came rushing in from having left work early. When he heard the news, tears burst from his eyes, the only ones I ever saw him shed, before he quickly got himself under control. Later, at the funeral home, my heart broke anew when I watched my grandparents sitting on a couch, holding hands, which I’d never seen them do, looking as if they had given up on life. I finally truly understood why people call their children ‘my baby’, no matter how old they are. My mother was a woman to me, but so very obviously still a girl to them, and the worst that could happen to a parent had happened to them. They didn’t do anything to deserve that any more than my mother deserved to die.

At the gathering after the funeral, I saw relatives I hadn’t seen in a long time. They welcomed me back from the Army and wanted to know what my plans were.

I had money saved up from my shoe store job before getting drafted. Plus almost all the money the Army had paid me, so I had a good start on college expenses to go along with what I’d be able get from the G.I. Bill. But I had to do something between now and college to keep from draining my funds.

My uncles thought I should take some time for myself. Apply for unemployment benefits, they said. They thought a lot of people who scammed the system were collecting and I deserved some of it more than them. For the first time since I was seven years old, probably because of what had just happened to my mother, my father agreed. At the Unemployment Office the case workers told me much the same thing, to take a little time to readjust and determine what I wanted to do.

So I did. I began a weekly ritual of driving up from Hartford where I shared an apartment in order to be near Danalee and collect my check. Had a couple of teeth drilled and filled at my dentist, compliments of the government’s one-time offer to get my mouth in tip-top shape and visited my sister, where she was waitressing at Fowle’s restaurant.

Danalee said she liked Volkswagens. On one of my trips back to Connecticut, I saw a 1961 Beetle for sale in someone’s yard and bought it. I traded the big white Dodge with the broken front spring and defective brakes for a dark green Bug with a white racing stripe. It didn’t have a heater, so we had to dress with a couple of layers of socks, long-johns, hats and scarves when using the car in the winter. Then the crankshaft broke and I had to have that repaired. It was a fun little car and the first that was ‘ours.’ We took some long drives and she knitted a black round scarf for me while riding in the passenger seat.

I got right back into running, of course! Hooking up sometimes with Vin Fandetti in Hartford to do laps around Colt Park, or in the evenings by myself around Bushnell Park near where I lived. Just about any place else I happened to be at. Twice a day for short workouts.

By early November I was racing again, slowly but with my best effort, and finished off the year with six races. Combined with the five from when I was home on leave, the eleven races for 1969 was the fewest of any year from 1964 to 1997.

At Thanksgiving we went to Danalee’s grandmother Webb’s for an overnight in separate rooms and dinner the next day. Muriel didn’t like me for Dana’s future husband any more than her mother did, but I thought it was Dana’s opinion that really counted. I continued with Plan A.

As 1969 drew to a close, Dana was heading to Washington D.C. for her nursing Psych training at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and I packed up the Volkswagen and drove her down.

I intended to stay.