Saturday Challenge: How I Met Your Mother

From last week's Randy Seaver Saturday Night Fun Challenge:

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to: 1) Do you know how, when and where your parents met? 

Mom & Dad a few years later

Hmm. I know how my parents met, but I don’t know who introduced them. Does this sound like I’m going in circles? Well, it’s because over the years I heard the same story, but two different versions. Both involve a classmate of my mother’s and a friend of my father’s. This couple later ended up marrying each other.

Carrie Bockes married Gordon Bross

Katherine Potucek married Jerome Nast

Both of the women above were in my mother’s class at Skaneateles High School. Both men were from the Moravia area and were either in Dad’s class or within a few years of it. Therefore, I’m not sure which set of names belongs in this story, as I have heard both couples mentioned in the telling of it.

Dad was hanging out in the village of Moravia near his parents’ farm one evening. This was not unusual as there was a roller skating rink and a bowling alley that he enjoyed. Sometimes he would help out at the bowling alley resetting pins if the regular employee wasn’t there as this was the time before mechanized lanes. A friend of his approached him that night and asked him for a favor.

“Gordon, I need you to help me out. I want to go see my girl Friday night, but she won’t go out with me unless I bring a date for her friend.”

“Oh?” Dad said.

“She’s a nice girl, but she doesn’t have a boyfriend and Carrie/Katherine doesn’t want to leave her sitting home alone on a Friday night.”

Dad agreed to go along with him as a favor and they had a double date. The friend that would have been home alone Friday night, of course, was Mom. Both couples continued dating and often would go out together. As fate would have it, my parents got married before the couple that introduced them.

My uncle is pretty sure that the girl he remembers fixing his sister up was Carrie Bockes. But, I’m positive that when I was a child, Mom told me this story and she mentioned Katherine. At the time, my school bus driver was “Mr. Nast” and she was telling me the story about people that I knew.

Whichever couple it actually was, the people involved were part of a group of friends. The three women grew up in and around the small village of Skaneateles. They all ended up marrying men from the Moravia area, a few miles to the southwest of there.

Addendum: Jim, my oldest brother, remembers Dad definitely blaming Gordon Bross for that happening. He remembers the story being told about Laverne (Carrie’s middle name that she also went by) and Gordon Bross. That is more definite than my uncle’s vague memory and closer to the time happening. As I grew up with Jerome Nast as a bus driver and in school with his youngest daughter, that is likely how the people drifted in my memory.

Telling stories gets them recorded. Sharing them with others adds details and sometimes, like above, fills in where we don’t know the answer.