Honeymoon do list

At last month’s Ladies Luncheon at Shorewood, I was seated next to a friend of the same age who will be married next month for the first time. When the subject of honeymoons came up I told the ladies around my table that my mom had a doozy of a wedding night herself.

My dad had decided they would honeymoon in Manhattan since he wanted to go to this dentist of the stars on Central Park South to be fitted with a new pair of dentures. My dad, who had grown up very impoverished, had all his teeth pulled by the dental school at the University of Michigan, where he studied pre-med on a full academic scholarship. As it turned out, Bette Davis entered the dentist’s waiting room with her two little dogs at the same time my dad was visiting.

For their 1960 wedding in Akron, Ohio, my dad, a very popular private physician in the Firestone Park neighborhood who met my mom when she responded to a newspaper ad he placed for a receptionist, had been dieting to look good for the ceremony and accompanying photos, etc.

After the reception and hour-and-a-half flight to LaGuardia,they had barely checked into their midtown hotel room when my dad suddenly announced he was going out for a minute and would be back.

My dad, a first-generation Norwegian-American who grew up on Lake Superior at the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, was extremely fond of Jewish deli items that reminded him of the foods he grew up on—Gefilte fish, smoked herring in cream sauce, salami on rye bread, knish, etc.

Unbeknownst to my mom, he had been jonesing for this type of New York deli big-time and escaped from the hotel straight over to one of those 24-hour automats that catered to all his favorite cravings.

Returning to his wife an hour later with a belly overloaded on such “delicacies,” he soon became ill and was unable to even consummate their marriage that evening!!

Thus began a 34-year marriage that was to be filled to the gills with the kooky, nutty, selfish, unpredictable, irresponsible, immature antics of an absolute eccentric of a husband, father and doctor. Only the good Lord knows how much my poor mom was made to endure!