CATEGORY: UNIVERSITY YEARS
PHOTOS: BOB AND ILLUSTRATED LETTERS

I met Bob Anderson at a party in Bend during the Christmas/New Year holiday season of 1966.  I was spending the holidays in my barn.  He had come from Portland to stay with friends and spend a few days skiing.  After we were introduced, he was very attentive for the rest of the evening.  I was entranced by his totally zany sense of humor and his talk about sailing.  He had a sail boat that he kept in Seattle!  He had a cat named Carl Jung!  The next day, he drove out to see me.  I thought he fell in love with me and the barn at the same time, but maybe it was just the barn.  Bob loved off-beat things and people.  Both qualified.

After I got back to Eugene, I realized that I was simply too stressed to go through the winter term at the University and deal with Jari too.  I decided we would take the term off, go back to my barn and rest for three months.

Bob was a successful graphic designer/commercial artist and a great cartoonist.  When he was back in Portland, we courted each other by mail.  He would send art extravaganzas: beautiful, cleverly illustrated letters:

I would answer with literary extravaganzas.  One of my letters that I remember contained the description of  a wind storm that was rolling the fence posts on my roof.  I said there were fence posts, tumble weeds, loose hay, whole hay stacks blowing by–oh yes, and a cow that looked like a mozzarella cheese hanging from a saw horse going end over end.   And there too went the milk maid and the milking stool.  I had told him when he visited that I was thinking of raising zebras on my forty acres.  My first letter after that contained these limericks:

THOUGHTS ABOUT RAISING ZEBRAS ON FORTY ACRES IN TUMALO

#1 A problem with breeders of Zebras
Is how to tell shebras from hebras.
It would be less a nuisance,
And of some Zebra useance,
If the females wore Maidenform C-bras.

#2 The aim of the Zebra commodity
Is to provide the latest in oddity;
Trained to lie on the floor
With their legs aft and fore:
It’s the new Zebra rug with more bodity.

Years of reading Ogden Nash had paid off.