Happy Valentine’s Day

It was a few days before Feb. 14, 1954. I walked to the candy store on Flatbush Avenue, just two or three blocks from our apartment on Fenimore Street in Brooklyn, NY. I’d heard that the store sold a small, heart-shaped box of chocolates that could be mailed. The bottom of the box had space to write an address and another space that was designated for some first-class stamps. I think the chocolates cost $1.

I wrote in Judy’s name and her address in Summit, New Jersey, applied the stamps, and hoped for the best. Judy was my girlfriend while her family and mine spent the three months of summer on the beach in Lawrence Harbor, NJ. The previous summer, Judy and I had waltzed on the boardwalk to some slow pre-rock-n-roll tune on my new portable radio.

Our summer romance was innocent, but our culture was different then. It was at least a decade before the “sexual revolution” took hold in the provincial states of the Atlantic northeast. And even if my motives weren’t “pure,” my sense of survival was spot on. Judy’s older brother was a weight-lifting bodybuilder who played football on his high-school team and had been offered an athletic scholarship to a university in Ohio.