Advice from decades of dating experience: If you want to move to romance, just dance

Our social studies teacher told us that day we would embark on scientific research in class.

“So,” she said, “would all those who have dates to the senior prom hold up your hands?”

Many did raise a hand, some rather proudly. Not me. I clamped arms tightly to my sides, dreading what would come next.

“Now, hands up for those who don’t have dates to the prom.”

“Hands up,” the same demand robbers bark at their victims. But she was a fine teacher. I hated to spoil her scientific study.

Raggedly, reluctantly, hands began to slide up around the room.

“Let’s see,” she murmured, counting the second batch off with her index finger. “It’s 19 with dates, 14 without. Still some undecideds. Now that’s the data we need for our study. Class dismissed.”

This happened in 1952. I was 17 and a senior at Daniel Webster high school in Tulsa. For all the talk of scientific research, this turned out to be a sinister plot. Before we even exited the room, kids with dates fanned out and began pulling together the withouts and undecideds, matching girls with boys for the prom, whether we liked it or not.

So I took Gwendolyn Seals. A band played ”Embraceable You,” “When I Fall in Love,” and many more hits. We swanned delightedly around the gym floor. I drove Gwen home in my dad’s 1940 Chevy, kissed her good night and, terribly shy, never dated her again.

Gwendolyn was my first “woman,” as I was her first “man.”

Next came Pat King, another fellow student, whom I dated for nearly a year. Saving herself for a sailor gone to duty in the Korean War, she would never even let me hold her hand. But we had fine times before we drifted apart. I was swimming alone later at a nearby WPA-built lake when I saw her on the far shore.

I swam across, to be met at lake’s edge by a beefy guy (not the sailor) who stepped forward into the water. For a fight? Certainly, not with me, the biggest coward in school. We shook hands and I kidded awhile with them before swimming back to the other side. That fellow later became her husband. Such was the end of Pat who, surprisingly, was not to be my final Pat.

As a college freshman, I met my first real love, who was 16 years old and a junior in high school. She was friend to a young woman who was my college buddy’s girlfriend. We two couples double-dated at a dance at an Oaks Country Club dance, where I had caddied as a raggedy 12-year-old. Back then I was absolutely forbidden to enter the snooty clubhouse.

Enter it I finally did, thanks to my date with Lenore. Later, on the terrace under misting rain, we danced to “In the Mood,” “When I Fall In Love,” “Your Heart Belongs to Me,” and more of those delicious melodies through which that day’s polite society roped us in. I asked Lenore out again. We drove toward the Starlight Ballroom in that 1940 Chevy, navigating a rain-soaked road.

Then a car whizzed past us, blasting a cataract of mud through the driver’s window. I caught it full, Lenore caught some, too. Calamity! A lovely evening spoiled.

“No, no,” she said. “We’re OK.”

We found a service station with open restrooms and scrubbed up. I was wearing one of those early nylon shirts, fabric like a shower curtain. Squeeze it dry, put it back on. We looked better than some others at the Starlight and danced our feet numb. What a girl, I thought, this Lenore.

We were four months into our romance before I first held her hand, during a hayride. Two months later, on a cold night after a movie date, I drove her home. We sat chilled beside each other in the parked car. I was a Baptist then. What happened next even now calls to mind a vaguely poetic reference.

We fell on each other “like the wolf on the fold,” she being as wolfish as I. That first kiss, in all its variety over the next hour, settled everything that came after. And still lasted only till the porch light at her front door began to blink — on, off, on, off — her mother suggesting it was time to quit.

We had a marvelous long marriage, two children, great friends. We had 61 years of pleasure in one another till Lenore died in 2017. During her final illness she several times told me, “Women will like you.” Not soon, as it turned out. Not for four years, until this slim lady one day tapped me on the shoulder at exercise class.

Because I had been a reporter for the Kansas City Star, she wondered whether I knew her brother-in-law, who once worked there. Nope. This woman, a year younger than I, turned out to be Pat, the second and by far the foremost Pat in my life.

We started out with the neutral dating jaunts so many elders try, the Nelson gallery, a winter walk through the Link from Union Station to the Sheraton hotel, a summer streetcar ride from the station to City Market and then a hike down to a Missouri river overlook. A year passed before we held hands.

Then we danced. Never dance if you’re looking to keep a friendship cool. We danced, indeed still dance every Friday at Meadowbrook Community Center, to a hot little five-piece combo, the vocalist often crooning:

“I love all the many charms about you,

Above all, I want my arms about you…”

Give it a try. See what dance can do.

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.