In late October, 1983, I first met Sally Winkle at the home of Olivia Caulliez, still married to my former Gonzaga colleague John Shideler at the time. Sally had just begun teaching German language and literature at Eastern Washington University. We had both attended the annual German Studies Association conference held that year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Sally was completing her PhD in German Language and Literature. We had not met at the conference, but it gave us plenty to talk about. My visit to Madison had indeed been a memorable occasion for me, my only visit to one of the major sites of the student rebellion and anti-war movement of the 1960s, with which I had sympathized so greatly. The balmy weather drew hundreds of students into the streets to enjoy the “Indian summer.” The student union, the Rathskeller, still served beer at the time, and the atmosphere of the city and especially the campus struck me as marvelously liberal and inviting. For Sally, who had already lived in Madison for six years, the weekend was probably nothing special, but we found in our conversation at Olivia’s that we were on the same wavelength in our political views and intellectual interests—so much so that for all practical purposes we were “computer-matched.” Sally had been an active member of the graduate teaching assistants’ union at the University of Wisconsin and had participated in a strike for higher wages and better working conditions a year or two before. Within a week we became an inseparable couple. Our sixteen-year age difference was no problem, at least not at the time. “It turns me on,” Sally told me, “that you think I am young.” And I was turned on by her slim figure and excellent mind.

I had been searching for a mate for more than a year, ever since my final separation from Steffi at the end of 1982. I was particularly attracted to two of my young female colleagues at Gonzaga, but they were each other’s best friends, and in my clumsy efforts at courtship I only managed to antagonize both of them! When one of them threw a tenure party for the other one in April 1983 and I was one of the few faculty members who were not invited, I knew I had ruined whatever chances I might have had with either of them. In my journal I recorded my reaction to this rebuff:

The war between the sexes: the effort to grow beyond the natural attraction to the opposite sex. Hence one competes for the superior psychological vantage point that confers autonomy. Make the other side want you more than you want them.—Insight derived from not being invited to [the] tenure party. Nice to have the insight, but wouldn’t it have been more fun to have been invited?

I took a mordant view of my motives:

Irony: in students as potential lovers I look for the parent-less, because they are more likely to defy convention (Kaye!). In older women as potential mates I look for those with close ties to their parents because they are more likely to have internalized the conventional goals of marriage and children (besides carrying the genes of longevity). They are less likely to give in to Lesbian temptations.

Obviously, my own inhibitions played a part in my problematic post-divorce relations with women:

It is easy to say, why not call her; the worst that can happen is that she’ll say no. For one thing, it isn’t the worst. She may say yes and not mean it. But what is even worse is that she says yes and you do not mean it. You mean it only if she reacts in a certain way. One inhibition, then, is fear of becoming a fraud, of being revealed as a fraud, because your phone call may promise something you can’t deliver.

Another inhibiting factor was the note of desperation that I seemed to convey. Martha Chrisman, an attractive young pianist in the music department who in June, 1986, moved to a better position at Purdue University, gave me some good advice: “You go too fast. You seem desperate. It takes all the romance out of it. A romance needs a little mystery, a little teasing.” Martha told her mother that I seemed very lonely. I asked her what her mother’s response had been. “She said she thought you’d better get your act together before you go out.” But Martha and I were too different ever to have made a harmonious and integrated couple. She was a bit of a born-again Christian who dragged me to Sunday services at a number of churches.

At the Plymouth Congregational Church with Martha. The minister with the ingratiating gestures and self-admiring public speaking style of Bob Carriker. Martha applying the lessons of the sermon to her problems with Fr. Leedale [chair of the music department], who gave her a bad evaluation after a sneak visit to her class: “I’ll get him through love,” and “I’m going to think of my problems as challenges from now on.” About the minister: “He doesn’t play it safe like other ministers. He disturbs people. He has the courage to speak of faith and love instead of how to save the world.”

Martha was quite aware of our basic incompatibility. Of a romantic rival, a young executive at a local credit union with whom she was going out, she said: “I don’t want him, but I want to want him; I want you, but I don’t want to want you.” To my plaint that she got sexually aroused with me but then transferred it to him, she responded, “Maybe it’s the other way round.”

When I met Sally, Nick was quite relieved. He had become quite worried that if my relationship with Martha developed any further, he would have to go to church every Sunday!

Twelve-year-old Nick was a bit wary of Sally, too, at first, for fear that our relationship was getting too close, as Sally frequently came over for supper. “When I see three pork chops on the counter,“ he admonished me, “I get really mad.” “I should sue you for waste of gas,“ he said at another time. “Have you and Sally ever thought about how much gas you are wasting when she cones over here?”

But when Sally finally moved in with us two years later in September 1985, they got along very well. Sally was very much affected by the second wave of the feminist movement, sometimes referred to as the Women’s Liberation Movement, reaching its crest in those years. I sympathized with the movement as well for its emphasis on equality, even if it seemed to make courtship more complicated than it had been when I grew up in the 1950s (not that the more rigid gender roles of an earlier era made it any easier for me). Several months before, on May 6, 1983, I had written in my journal:

Feminism only elevates courtship to a higher level; it does not change its dynamics. If anything, it reinforces the age-old dynamic: men must really be men: must act independently and courageously: must be prepared to court even the formidable new woman: must not sit on their asses: must not be afraid to act just because women, too, are autonomous, career-oriented, and equal. Another way of putting it is that the war between the sexes did not start with feminism: it only took a more honest, less devious form.

The best case for feminism: those who are aware of their own rights are also more aware of the rights of others.

Sally herself was somewhat torn by conflicting emotions, as recorded in my journal on November 23, 1983:

Sally telling me how Miles, her bisexual friend, had analyzed her two personalities and called them “Anna Mae” and “Beatrix” respectively. “Anna Mae” wants to be taken care of by a man, “Beatrix” is the liberated independent woman. The United Nations Association meeting in Cheney the day before yesterday had distressed “Beatrix,” because Sally had behaved so much like “Anna Mae”. Instead of sitting in a comfortable unclaimed armchair (on which we had placed her coat), from where she could have conversed comfortably with other visitors, she sat down in a corner of the sofa next to me. From there she was virtually excluded from the conversation both because I blocked her line of discourse, and she didn’t know any of the people there, except [her colleague in government] Ernie Gohlert, who was giving a talk on his trip to Malaysia. Ernie’s presence only made her feel more inadequate, since she had, in effect, chosen to retreat behind me.—The question in my mind was, do I force her, by my behavior, into the role of “Anna Mae”? I had thought that her self-doubts had a different source: that “Anna Mae” felt neglected by my lack of a firmer commitment than our present practice of sleeping together on weekends. The fact that it is “Beatrix” who is aggrieved does not entirely reassure me. For “Beatrix” is angry at “Anna Mae” for wanting what “Anna Mae” wants.

Sally herself was not happy with this artificial distinction between the traditionalist “Anna Mae” and the feminist “Beatrix”, and by the time I met her she had fully embraced a feminism that explained gender not as biologically given but as a social and cultural construct. This did lead to some animated discussions in which Sally criticized my more traditional views, as recorded on January 22, 1984:

Argument yesterday with Sally: she took issue with my explanation of promiscuity among young male homosexuals, which was that young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five have a powerful sex drive for which there is no socially acceptable outlet. Sally objected to this notion, because the powerful male sex drive is sometimes cited as an excuse to meliorate the blame attached to rapists. When I said it was not my intention to provide such an excuse, she nonetheless objected to the notion that men had a more powerful sex drive than women, because that argument could be used to rationalize rape. This frustrated me.: “You deny reality and truth because it is not convenient to the feminist cause.”—“What you call reality and truth may not be truth from a different perspective,” she responded. “The whole notion of ‘objective reality’ has been used to perpetuate an androcentric point of view.” I tried another tack: “All I’m doing is providing an explanation for male homosexual promiscuity, an explanation designed to counter the biased view that homosexuals are by nature promiscuous. What you are saying about the application of this explanation to rape is irrelevant.”—“You are trivializing my argument by calling it irrelevant. It is typical of the male inability or refusal to see any other point of view.”—“I, too, object to using the notion of male hyper-sexuality to justify rape,” I retorted. “But that doesn’t allow me to close my eyes to the truth.”—“What may be true for you may not be true for me.”—“But your truth has no bearing on the statement I am making. It is an entirely separate issue.”—“From my perspective it isn’t. Your failure to see and make the connection is precisely the limited vision I challenge.”—“If our perception of truth is so different, we will never be able to close the chasm between us.”—“All I want you to do is make the effort to see my side and not to trivialize my side by calling it ’irrelevant,’ or ‘irrational,’ or ‘subjective,’ or ‘illogical,’ while validating your own side as ‘objective.’”

The argument made me acutely aware of how real the conflict between the sexes is, how unbridgeable the chasm may well be. For it seems that what I am being asked to do is no less than to give up my objective view of reality—a view that has served male interests and does not take “subjective” feminine perspectives sufficiently into account. The argument helped me to understand the genealogy of [my ex-wife] Steffi’s dictum, “Sex ist alles (sex is everything).” For if the interests and perspectives of the sexes are so different, the sexual attraction is ultimately the only sure bond. It also seemed to clarify the origins of the old saw, to wit that women do not think as logically as men. Thus a feminist attack on sexism reinforces a sexist prejudice.

On December 6, 1983, we attended a firebrand talk by the ex-Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson on the theme epitomized by her militant dictum, “To be born female is to be born behind enemy lines.” Her most damning indictment of men was her assertion, “They say, ‘if you do not meet our demands, we will not love you.’” More valid, in my judgment, was her starkly expressed insight, “Human beings love human beings. They don’t love doormats.” After the talk I confessed to Sally that I felt thoroughly chastened, to which Sally replied, “good!” But Sally credited me with a “maternal streak:” “I like it when you warm up my feet, but I don’t like it when you tell me how to teach. I don’t like it when you seem to do everything that I do better. It does not help my low self-esteem.” John Wagner of the philosophy department went so far as to say (as reported to me by Martha): “The only reason women like Rod so much is because he’s a feminist.”

My seventeen-year-old daughter Trina came home to Spokane at Christmas, 1983, with some very exciting news: she had just been admitted to Harvard on early decision, an admissions practice that Harvard ended a few years later to enlarge its pool of candidates and to equalize the opportunities for low-income and minority groups. At the annual Spokane Harvard Club luncheon between Christmas and New Year’s in 1983, Trina announced: “My greatest fear about going to Harvard is that I think of it as so perfect, such a pillar, that I’m afraid this image will crumble when I go there.” She needn’t have feared disillusionment, however. Indeed she ended up marrying a fellow Harvard graduate, Garth Jonson, in 1995 and remained a resident of Cambridge or Boston from 1984 on. She completed a doctorate at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2006 and continues to conduct research there on epidemiological risk assessment to the present day.

In the spring of her senior year at Kent School, however, her rebellious streak surfaced with a few unhappy ramifications. Trina had taken her mother’s VW bug (Steffi did not drive) with her to Kent, where she parked it at the home of Olaf’s mother-in-law Mrs. Sleighter, as Kent School did not permit its students to have automobiles on campus. However, Trina made the mistake of lending her car to some fellow students who were involved in a minor accident, thus bringing this violation of Kent School’s rules against students’ use of automobiles to light. Although Trina was allowed to graduate in June, 1984, she had to forfeit all of the many honors and awards she had earned for her scholarly achievements. Fortunately, these disciplinary actions did not affect her admission to Harvard

Signs of teen-age rebellion continued at least for a while at Harvard. At Christmas time 1984, Trina came home to Spokane with a blue streak in her hair. This even merited a mention in the “Undergraduate” column of Harvard Magazine which noted the presence in the Yard of a freshman girl known simply as “Blue.”

Although as a child Trina had been highly critical of her mother’s smoking habit, provocatively posting “No Smoking” signs all over the house, now she came home with a carton of cigarettes, which she proceeded to smoke in her upstairs bedroom over the course of her two-week stay.

Aunt Temple died of cancer in Florida on February 24, 1984, the first of her generation of our immediate family (our cousin, Olaf’s benefactor Pauline Emmet, had died the year before). Despite her illness Aunt Temple had stopped off to see me in Spokane on her way to her daughter Liz and son-in-law Roby Rosenthal’s home in Seattle in July, 1983. Perhaps she anticipated the approaching end of her life, because she brought Christmas presents for my family, as if she sensed that she might not be around to send them at the end of the year.

She is exemplary in her grittiness, in her strength in the face of old age and ill health, her total lack of self-pity. But it is precisely this hardness, manifested in rather gruff attitudes, opinions, and even language, this determination not to let the world get to her, this invulnerability, that makes conversation with her, not a bore, but a chore. I was hoping to get some information and insight into Mama’s life in the 1930s. But Aunt Temple could no longer remember when Mama had come to America [on vacations] or for how long. She could not even remember the last year she, Aunt Temple, had been in Germany herself. None of that particularly interested her. To the explanation of Mama’s psyche she did contribute the hypothesis that Mama had had things too easy! She should not have been supported as much as she had been by Granny. There is an unconscious economy in Aunt Temple’s outlook; all her sensibilities have become mobilized in the fight to assert herself against disease, weakness, self-doubt, loss of will. A courageous old lady, but tedious. It is the same quality that years ago I called “impersonal,” though Mama objected and insisted she was “too personal.”

The co-residence of Aunt Temple and Mama in the house that Aunt Temple had built for Mama in Vermont had not worked out as planned. Each of their increasingly infrequent attempts to live together in harmony had ended acrimoniously. Just who was most to blame for the friction between the two sisters is difficult to determine. Suffice it to say that they got on each others’ nerves. Aunt Temple had the means to live elsewhere, and that was the course that she chose, eventually settling in Florida, where Uncle Nick and Aunt Virginia had already made their home several years before. Mama claimed that Aunt Temple had resented her since childhood for usurping her place as the pampered youngest sibling, but I did not trust her self-serving explanation. It seemed to me too obviously a rationalization of Mama’s own life-long resentment of her dominant and successful older sister.

In the summer of 1984 I attended a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) faculty seminar conducted by the prolific Germanist Sander Gilman at Cornell University on the German fin de siècle (1890-1900). I was chosen as a seminar participant for my “expertise” on Houston Stewart Chamberlain, on whom I gave a formal presentation, but the research project I worked on at Cornell was quite different. It was an analysis of the Marxist appraisal and almost unanimous rejection of Nietzsche’s philosophy, most famously in Györgi Lukásc’s The Destruction of Reason (1954). My motivation was to see if Nietzsche’s thought, so easily and often misappropriated by right-wing ideologues, could not be made useful for the left. On the basis of my study of völkisch ideology and Nietzsche’s apostasy after his rejection of Wagnerian nationalism and religiosity in the mid-1870s, I suspected that the affinities between Nietzsche and Marx were greater than conventionally assumed. Certainly Nietzsche’s “denazification” was no longer controversial, at least not in the West, especially after the publication of Walter Kaufman’s pioneering demolition of the popular caricature of Nietzsche as proto-Nazi. Also contributing to Nietzsche’s “denazification” was his wholesale appropriation by post-modernists as the preceptor of their key insight that, in the words of Richard Rorty, “truth is made and not found.” While Kaufman had shown the incompatibility of Nietzsche’s ideas with völkisch ideology, I focused more on “The Völkisch Reaction to Nietzschean Thought,” the subtitle of an article I published in March 1983 in a journal edited by my counterpart at Washington State University, Bob Grathwohl. Bob had persuaded me to publish my article in his low-circulation journal, entitled Research Studies. Somewhat against my better judgment I accepted his invitation, not only as a favor to Bob, but also because I was impatient to see my article in print. My doubts proved all too sound when the journal folded only a few issues later. Bob Grathwohl, who lost his wife to cancer at a much too early age, subsequently moved to Washington, DC, where he took a position with the National Endowment for the Humanities

One of my conclusions in the paper I turned in to Sander Gilman in July 1984 was that Nietzsche’s main target was not the socialism of the left or the ideas of Karl Marx, whose works he only knew through the distorted lens of the renegade Social Democrat Eugene Dühring, whom Nietzsche roundly condemned for his antisemitic views. Instead, Nietzsche’s primary target was the very moralism that was routinely mobilized by the religious right (or the “moral majority”) to oppose and discredit socialism. But I could not simply close my eyes to the fact that Nietzsche’s ideas had indeed proved very useful to the Nazis, whether in distorted form or not. In an oral presentation on “Nietzsche and the Nazis” I tried to account for Nietzsche’s link to Nazism, notwithstanding his unqualified condemnation of German nationalism, his contempt for the Wilhelmine Reich, and his rejection of Christian as well as racial antisemitism:

Although Nietzsche was a profound critic of the German idealist tradition that culminated (in corrupted form) in Germanic and völkisch ideology, Nietzsche (perhaps inevitably) incorporated precisely those elements of that tradition that made it easily possible to misuse his philosophy and misunderstand his aims. His tendency to view politics as a degrading activity was very characteristic of the German intellectual tradition, mirroring the lack of democratic participation in German monarchical society. His philosophy could be easily misused for political purposes because it lacked any grounding in social reality. From the Marxist point of view he did not raise the right questions, since he attached absolutely no importance to the class struggle or economic reform. Living very frugally, he didn’t need to worry about questions of subsistence, because he enjoyed a small but regular retirement pension after he resigned his university position at Basel —a very small-scale example of the Marxian principle that the ideological superstructure is ultimately determined by the economic base. But one can also put it differently: a man of Nietzsche’s integrity could not, in the last analysis, bite the hand that fed him. Nietzsche’s failure to provide any social analysis left concepts like “herd animals,” “blond beasts,” “superman,” or “the will to power” to be misused and exploited for the very cause he most detested. His link with the Nazis lies in the anti-materialist and anti-socialist bias that he shared with the conservative “idealists” that he criticized. He dismissed the “social question,” i.e., matters of social equality, social justice, and social reform, as trivial—a distraction from really important questions. A cruel dialectic was operative in the fate of Nietzsche’s ideas. In the sense that he was himself very much a representative and victim of Germany’s undemocratic tradition, he was indeed, I think, an unwitting contributor to the eventual triumph of Nazism in his country.

So great was my obsession to reconcile Nietzsche with Marx that I finally reached the paradoxical conclusion that while Marxists were right to reject Nietzsche’s aristocratic and anti-political radicalism, one had to share some of Nietzsche’s iconoclasm, integrity, and independence to fully embrace Marx’s ideal of equality—at least in the West. In other words, one had to be an adherent of Nietzsche’s values in order to become a good Marxist. Sander Gilman suggested that I send my paper to Ernst Behler at the University of Washington, one of the editors of Nietzsche-Studien, the journal in which I had published my article, “The Role of Heinrich von Stein in Nietzsche’s Emergence as Critic of Wagnerian Idealism and Cultural Nationalism,” in 1976. But the editors of Nietzsche-Studien objected to such a sweeping “denazification” of a thinker still widely reviled in guilt-ridden post-war Germany for his putative influence on the Nazis. I had to wait until 1989 for my article’s publication in a German translation under the title, “Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus,” in the newly-founded philosophical journal prima philosophia. Much later I also incorporated many of these ideas in the concluding chapter of a book edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, entitled Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2002).
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While I was at the NEH seminar in Ithaca in the summer of 1984, Sally was working hard on completing her dissertation, later published as Woman as Feminine Bourgeois Ideal. Occasionally she would call to express her frustration at the slow pace of her progress and to complain that she was stuck and couldn’t seem to find a way to go on. I tried to allay her self-doubts, but I was also acutely aware that if I dismissed them as unwarranted, I might well be accused of not taking them (or her) seriously enough. This put me into a bit of a “catch-22” quandary, damned if I didn’t take her low estimation of her work or prospects of success s at face value, but even more damned if I did. “You don’t realize,” she chided me, “that I have always had low self-esteem, which makes me view things more negatively than they really are.” My quandary was predictably resolved when Sally finished her dissertation and defended it in Madison with flying colors in October 1984. Her department at Eastern Washington University celebrated her achievement with a festive dinner in November of that year.

In the 1984-1985 academic year I went up for promotion to full professor at the earliest opportunity after the mandatory three years in rank. I knew my chances were not good as my book, Idealism Debased, had already been used to justify my promotion to Associate Professor in 1981, and I had only produced one article and several papers since then. But I thought that my service as director of the International Studies Program might tip the balance in my favor. Promotion was important to me for financial reasons. Although at the time there was still no systematic correlation between rank and salary at Gonzaga (that would not come until the administration’s belated acceptance of the annual salary survey of the College and University Professional Association [CUPA] as the standard for determining faculty salaries in 1988 after prolonged negotiations with the salary committee of the Faculty Assembly), the Gonzaga Summer School did peg its compensation to faculty rank. Promotion would mean several hundred dollars more for each Summer School class I taught, and I was forced to teach as many as I could to cover not only our household expenses but also Trina’s tuition at Kent School and Harvard, where, despite the generous financial aid she was awarded on the basis of need, she still had to take out a fairly sizable student loan. Again I knew my promotion would be opposed by my colleague Bob Carriker, but I hoped I could prevail, as I had in my struggle for tenure in 1982. That struggle had continued within the department in 1982-1983 and may have prejudiced our young colleague John Shideler‘s chances for reappointment in spring 1982. Shideler, a Berkeley PhD, had been hired to replace Father Via as the departmental medievalist after Via’s transfer to the directorship of the Gonzaga-in-Florence program in 1981. Shideler, whose academic standards may have been excessively rigorous for the kind of students we served, received poor student evaluations in his first semester, but what may have been even more decisive in the department’s refusal to reappoint him was the fact that he tended to side with me in departmental disputes. He may have been right on the merits of the specific cases in dispute, but he undoubtedly overestimated the power or influence I wielded in the department—or in the university, for that matter.

At any rate my application for promotion was turned down in spring 1985. My reaction was foolish and impulsive. I resigned my position as director of the International Studies Program, thus further marginalizing my status and giving my departmental rivals exactly what they wanted!

In resigning as director of the International Studies Program, had I cut off my nose to spite my face? It reminded me of a nightmare I had recorded in my journal on September 21, 1983, a month before meeting Sally.

Extraordinary and therapeutic nightmare of giving up my job at Gonzaga. Extraordinary in capturing the psychological nuances: saying goodbye to faculty services [the secretarial pool]—they are incredulous and slightly resentful of my departure, as if it reflected on them. In the outer office (administration?) they are so busy, they hardly take notice of me. Sitting in the waiting room is Ernie Gohlert [director of International Studies at Eastern Washington University], sympathetic, silently solicitous, reflecting in his attitude his conviction that I am behaving like a fool or a madman. I go outside and am overwhelmed by what I have done—and can’t even remember the reason why I did it. It must be because I wanted to write?? The only consoling thought is the one I frequently have in less critical situations: good if things go bad, because it forces me to write, since there is nothing else I can do, no other fulfillment. I turn to a nondescript female friend, round-faced, almost like Sandy Raynor [our friend from Vermont], except it’s someone closer to me. She does not want me to talk to her, because she is afraid of the emotional burden it will place on her. I compel her, “Look at me,” but saying it in a way to reassure her that I wasn’t going to ask any favors or cry on her shoulder. “Why did I do such a foolish thing?” I ask, half-knowing that her response will be one of relief that she is not being called upon for any greater donation than perfunctory encouragement.

Origins: seeing Mike Matthis [my colleague in philosophy who had been denied reappointment by his department], laughing to himself on the couch in the faculty lounge at lunch time, making me aware of how much I have neglected him, making me think he must feel like an invisible man.

Mike Matthis, who shared my interest in Nietzsche (though less so in Marx), was my best friend at Gonzaga until his forced departure in August 1984. We played tennis together, enjoyed each other’s company, and engaged in long and sometimes disputatious conversations about philosophy and politics. We also shared a lingering disaffection from Gonzaga as a result of the hostility we faced in our respective departments. Mike and his wife Rose “house-sat” for me at my place on Maringo Drive in the summer of 1984, shortly before they left Spokane for the east coast. Mike later returned to his home state of Texas, where today he is a tenured professor of philosophy at Lamar University in Beaumont.

The election of 1984 was another huge disappointment. In retrospect, it seems strange that we could ever have had any expectation of a Mondale victory. Reagan and Bush carried every state in the Union except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. But Reagan’s tax cuts for corporations and huge increases in defense spending had led to the largest budget deficit in American history in 1982 and a temporary economic recession. This, coupled with his recklessly militant rhetoric against the “Evil Empire” and his plans for a “Star Wars” missile shield undercutting the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, gave us some hope that his presidency would receive the popular rebuff it so richly deserved, unlikely as that prospect may seem in retrospect. There was an air of gloom as our small circle of friends gathered to watch the election results at the home of Ursula Hegi, newly arrived in Spokane to teach in the creative writing department at EWU. Ursula was not only a writer, but also a chess player. She had contacted me before her arrival to inquire about opportunities for joining a chess club in Spokane. I was happy to be able to tell her about our active local club, called the Inland Empire Chess Club at the time, which I had helped to revive from its moribund state several years before.

In August 1985, after Sally spent a summer in Germany at a Fulbright seminar similar to the one I attended in 1982, she and I visited her twin sister Sue and her family in Evanston, Wyoming. That gave me a chance to see Sally’s parents again. I had already met them in June, when they came to Spokane to attend an Elder-Hostel course at Whitworth College. On our trip to Evanston and especially on the way back we did some sightseeing and visited Yellowstone National Park.

After our return from Wyoming, Sally moved in with us at 9708 E. Maringo Drive. It extended her commute to Cheney to 26 miles each way, often delayed by trains at the railroad crossing on Argonne Avenue until the construction of an overpass a few years later. But living together greatly reinforced the stability of our relationship and worked out well to everyone’s satisfaction.

We briefly explored the possibility of moving into a different jointly-owned home, but were somewhat limited in our choices by Nick’s desire not to leave West Valley High School, where he had just started his freshman year. The houses for sale in that district were certainly no improvement over our humble and inexpensive abode on the Spokane River at Maringo Drive. There we would remain for another sixteen years.

‘