I first met Dorothy at a church picnic in Elgin Ill. Her brother Gordon was a classmate of mine at St. Olaf, and I was working at the Chicago and Northwestern freightyard in Proviso Ill as a seal clerk. I would open freight cars filled with grain, then the sampling team would come with their long prods and get samples to test and turn in their report. The most aggressive of the grain samplers was one who fill up the trunk of his car with sacks of grain to take care of his chicken business at home. It was just a trivial racket, and not really reportable. I had another experience there where for one reason or another I was to come in and work on Saturday. I arrived and there weren't many cars that day, so I wrote down what was correct - 3 hours of work - and turned in my report. The union rep, or some other important figure, came up to me and said: "Look, kid - if you show up on Saturday, I don't care how long you work, you report 8 hours." So, what does this have to do with meeting Dorothy? I'm old enough to be entitled to move onto or off topic as I see fit. The reason I got off my story was that I was asked how come I was in Chicago. I answered: "I was working at the Proviso freightyard, and staying with my mother's half-sister, my Aunt Gertrude (Tante)." And now I should get back to the main story.
Dorothy was a jr in high school at this time and she her cousin Marjorie were playing a pipe organ. There were many Rovelstads at the picnic. Dorothy's father had 1 sisiter and 5 brothers and assorted wives and children so there were a lot of people at the picnic.
Two years later Dorothy arrived at St Olaf, I was a junior at the time. As she was sister of one of my friends it was my duty to take here on a date. We went downtown with a bunch of other people from college (a fraternity party). Dorothy was upset that she was not introduced to Art's friends that were met while on their date. We seemed to get along fine. They also went biking, hiking, canoeing, shooting rabbits, picnicing in the dead of winter and all sorts of "normal" dates. We would go to the Ole store and get coffee and hot chocolate. We had access to a car for awhile. My oldest bro was married and was a dr in jamaca with the army. His wife taught in Chaska, she also had a car. On signifcant occasions we could borrow her car. The car had a rumble seat and we would pile in about 4 people and go to Minneapolis for dancing or concerts. We also hitchhiked to Minneapolis to go to a concert once.
After college our corresopondace was casual but one of my marine corps assignments was being in charge of communications facility at the Newport (arkansas) airport. There were empty apts on the base for very cheap. Dorothy was not sure what to do for a job. I called her father and said maybe we should get married. Incidnetaly this phone call was made while shopping for engagment rings.
Kirsten's take on the story- Art was a vacation from the military and visited Dorothy. He decided that it would be nice to take Dorothy back to Ark with him so they were to be married before he had to go back to Ark.
When the war ended we had a honeymoon in St Louis, MI. Everything was closed because everyone was celebrating the end of the war. We had difficulty finding food due to this. Then we took a train to Newport and we had fried chicken that was delicious because we had been starving in St Louis.
Then we moved to Newport and Dorothy was a soloist at the Methodist church. We had base parties and went dove hunting for entertainment. We once bought a live chicken and tried fatten it up for eating and tied it to our front porch. Dorothy was good at killing chickens. On a certain dove shooting endevour Dorothy was nearly shot as she had a habit of sneaking around by the doves.