A Life In Four Colors Part Forty-Six

I've told you about my 1968 discovery of a Cedartown comics fan named Susan Hendrix (who went on to become my wife three years after our first meeting). But what did Susan think about this strange phone call regarding her letter of comment? I can answer that definitively, because I still have her letter to me in which she discussed it.

(Yes, I said "letter." We may have lived less than twenty miles apart, but we still wrote letters to one another. Part of it was because we both felt very comfortable writing, but another reason was that Susan lived in a two bedroom house with her parents, her grandparents, her sister, and her brother, and there was virtually no privacy.)

Here's what Susan wrote about that conversation in her first letter to me. "I was surprised and apprehensive when you asked me about my letter in Batman. I thought you were probably someone from my high school who had found out about my letter and was calling to give me a hard time. If I seemed a little reluctant to talk, that was why. It took me a few minutes to realize that you weren't going to make fun of me."

Susan still wasn't sure what to think of me, however. We exchanged three rounds of letters with one another between the date of that first letter and the time that we finally agreed to meet, some three months afterwards. (Yes, that means that in two months, we exchanged four letters with each other--four from me, four replies from her. Not the heaviest level of correspondence ever, but we were just casual acquaintances at that time.) We chose something as close to Neutral Territory as we could think of: my grandmother's house in Cedartown, less than two miles from her house.  The meeting date was June 15th, 1968. 

Why did we meet at my grandmother's house rather than at Susan's house? Simple: Susan was 17 and had a driver's license. I was 14 (I would turn 15 in August of that year) and could not drive, so I had no way to get to her house other than to ask my parents to take me, and that seemed both awkward and unlikely to happen. Susan could arrange to borrow her parents' car for a short while, so we agreed to get together at 2pm. (Yes, in spite of the fact that I was almost three years younger than her, she was willing to meet with me. In retrospect, that was pretty amazing.)

I was sitting one one of the wrought-iron chairs under the pine trees in my grandmother's front yard at 623 Olive Street when Susan pulled into the driveway (I had carefully cleaned the chairs to ensure that they were suitable for company). I was nervous (let's just say that I wasn't a very suave and debonair fourteen year old, okay?) as I got up to meet her at her car. She opened the door and got out.

Susan was wearing a blue-and-white-striped dress with a white Peter Pan collar and red buttons (It has been more than 51 years, and I can still see that dress in every detail--and I can still see Susan's face just as clearly.) Susan was smiling a bit stiffly; as I got to know her more, I came to know that as her nervous smile. We introduced ourselves to each other, and I invited her to sit on one of the wrought-iron chairs. She sat, her hands crossed in her lap, and we began to talk. The conversation began with a discussion of that phone call, then some comic book talk, then some music talk. Gradually, Susan began to relax a little bit. She laughed a bit as we discussed television shows we liked, and how our families felt about our entertainment interests. She asked me about the fanzines I had contributed to, and said she'd like to see them. I promised to send her some.

And then we realized the an hour had passed, and she had promised to get the car back to her family that afternoon. That white 1963 Dodge was their only car, and they needed to run some errands that afternoon. I walked her to her car, we said goodbye, and that was the end of our first meeting.

Was it mutual love at first sight? No, but it was mutual like at first sight, which was all I could hope for at the time. The last thing she said to me that day was, "I hope we get to see each other again soon." In a letter soon after that, she wrote, "I hope that didn't sound too forward, but I really had a good time talking with you. I don't have any friends I can talk to about comics or science fiction, and it was so enjoyable to talk about that stuff with someone who didn't think I was stupid for reading it." 

And beginning with that meeting, our correspondence increased. We were writing each other at least once a week, and we actually began setting up a time to talk on the phone--a time usually scheduled around her family's schedule, so that she would have some time to talk without everyone overhearing every word of her side of the conversation.

It wasn't a romance yet, but it was moving in the right direction...