"Look what the postman brought!" was the first thought that popped into Bonny's head as I walked by the window of her apartment on that Sunday morning in April. She opened the door, and after we said hello she offered me a cup of coffee. I accepted, gratefully. I was bleary-eyed from having been out late the night before on a date. That night was to be my last with a woman other than Bonny.
Although this was the first time we had ever met, Bonny and I felt as if we had known each other for a long time. We had been corresponding for about eight weeks, and in our letters to each other we had revealed some of her innermost thoughts and dreams. In fact, at that moment, we knew each other better than many couples who have been together for six months, or a year, or perhaps, a lifetime.
The chain of events leading to this meeting started for me soon after the beginning of the year 1964. I saw an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times for a company called Interpersonal Research Association for what they called the Human Inventory. They claimed to be able to match men and women by computer. In 1964, computers were not well understood, and were associated with science fiction in the minds of many people so this may have seemed like a fantastic claim at the time.
However, I worked for IBM and had been doing computer programming for two years and knew that matching people by computer was at least theoretically possible. My logical mind was intrigued by the possibilities. What could be more sensible than to match men and women on the basis of interests and aptitudes?
In the four years I had been in California since graduating from college, my hit record of finding compatible members of the opposite sex was very poor. I am not a bar hopper by inclination, since I don't operate well in noisy, crowded conditions. In fact I was never very good at picking up girls under any conditions. I have to know a woman fairly well before I can decide whether I want to go out with her. With me there is no such thing as love at first sight, although I have been known to lust at first sight, as has everybody else, I suspect, both male and female.
Most of my dates had been women I knew through work, or acquaintances of friends, or of the blind variety. My selection process had been random, and it was not producing satisfactory results. I was in my middle twenties, and ripe for the picking, as Bonny likes to say.
The deciding factor was the cost, only $50, certainly a bargain, even by 1964 standards. I would even get a dollar back if I responded to the ad promptly. I responded promptly. Today, Bonny and I occasionally refer to each other as "my $49 bargain."
In the mean time, Bonny was having similar problems. She did not lack for dates, but the quantity far outstripped the quality. The last straw came when a man she had been dating claimed he had forgotten his wallet. They were in a restaurant and he wanted Bonny to "lend" him the money to pay the bill. It was the second time he had done this. She excused herself, called a taxi, and went home. The next day she saw the ad for Human Inventory and signed up.
What we received from Human Inventory was a profile questionnaire and a test. The questionnaire asked for the following information: height, weight, race, citizenship, descent, hair color, eye color, religion, health, whether any previous marriages, whether widowed or divorced, education, number of dependents, occupation, whether we drank socially, interests, and preferences in a mate. The test professed to ferret out our attitudes or interests in the following areas: theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, religious, conformity and attitude toward sex.
An explanation was given for most areas. For theoretical, the explanation was: THEORETICAL - A person scoring high in this value places great importance upon the ascertainment of truth, or systematizing his knowledge, making intellectual observations, and exercising his powers of reason. Often he has a strong scientific or philosophical makeup. He is one who tries to discern identities and differences; he is an analyst who strives for objectivity.
Conformity and attitude toward sex were particularly important, we were advised, and matching couples should have scores that were close to each other. There was no explanation for these two areas, so apparently HI thought they were self-evident. Bonny and I both rated low in conformity and high in attitude toward sex, I higher than Bonny. My high score scared Bonny initially, and she had visions of me being an enterprising rapist.
After sending our profiles and tests back to Human Inventory, we were both assigned numbers and sent profiles of 25 potentially matching members of the opposite sex. I was Adam SC 25,568; Bonny was Eve SC 35,275. The SC stood for Southern California. I diligently searched through my 25 profiles and rejected all of them. I figured that the computer had goofed, and wrote a letter to HI asking for some more. I had not received Bonny's profile. Bonny, on the other hand, had received mine.
Bonny sent notes to me and one other person. Our real names and addresses were protected, and all correspondence was carried on through HI who forwarded it to the proper person. Thus, nobody had to reveal his or her true identity until he or she was ready.
The other person Bonny wrote to responded with a note giving his name and telephone number and asked for a meeting. They met for coffee so they would not waste time and money on a date if they were not right for each other. They weren't. As Bonny put it, "He was just like his scores said he was." End of story.
Bonny's two-page letter to me gave her profile, test scores, and some other background information. it was signed with her pseudonym. Although I was immediately interested in her, being a cautious person, I felt it would be better to remain incognito for awhile. My letter in response asked for her philosophy of life, and I also asked for a picture, which she duly supplied. My first thought on seeing it was, "Anybody with a figure like that can't be all bad." She enclosed a six-page letter and I matched it, along with a picture.
We corresponded for about two months. We both wrote several lengthy letters on weighty subjects. We were in substantial agreement on all the important things and after awhile I became very anxious to meet this enigmatic Eve. She finally told me her first name, and then I broke and revealed name, address and telephone number.
Bonny called me as soon as she received my letter. We made a date for the following Sunday morning. I had guessed that we lived about 25 miles apart, "a not insurmountable distance" as I had said in one of my letters. I was not far wrong. I was living in Monterey Park, she in Lomita.
As we sat there that April morning, talking in her apartment, sipping coffee and trying to wake up, we were immediately comfortable with each other. There were none of those tentative questions about each other's life style, likes and dislikes. We already knew the answers. We decided to go to the San Diego Zoo for the day, and on the 100-plus mile drive our conversation picked up from where our letters had left off.
At the zoo, we were holding hands by the time we got to the sea lions. It was an idyllic day. On the way back, we stopped in La Jolla to look at the coast and at a restaurant for a leisurely dinner. We got back to her apartment fairly late. We talked for a few minutes, kissed good night and I left, although I didn't want to. Bonny said afterward, "One minute you were there; the next minute you were gone."
We had made a date for the following Friday evening. We didn't talk to each other between Sunday and Friday because I am not much for telephone calls other than for business purposes. When I got to her apartment on Friday evening, her first words were, "I didn't know whether you would really come," and my rejoinder was, "Oh, ye of little faith." She cooked dinner for me. It was good.
On my birthday in May, Bonny plied me with champagne. Her grandfather, back in Connecticut, who had never expressed any interest in her male friends before, sent her money to buy a pair of hiking boots on being told I liked to hike. Bonny bought a pair and we climbed a mountain. I was the one who got blisters, although I had to coax her the last few hundred yards to the top. We combined our Blue Chip stamps to buy a Coleman stove.
I received a letter from another Eve expressing an interest in meeting me. I wrote her a brief note saying that I was otherwise occupied at the moment but would keep her on file. I never wrote to her again.
Our relationship blossomed for three months. At the end of July I was scheduled to go to Camp Roberts for two weeks of Army Reserve training. Camp Roberts is about 250 miles north of Los Angeles. Bonny, being a school teacher, had the summer off and had been scheduled to spend the month of August with relatives in the East. As the time approached for these two trips, thoughts of being apart filled us with anguish. We agreed that Bonny would make her trip as short as decently possible.
Finally, the day came when I had to board the train taking our division to Camp Roberts. It was a slow train and took all night to make the trip. The soldiers were jammed in together and we got precious little sleep. Even so, I started writing letters to Bonny the next day and she started writing to me. I told how our Commanding General had volunteered our division to go to Viet Nam. Fortunately, we were the worst equipped division in the country, so of course we never went.
Bonny drove up to Camp Roberts on the week end. We toured the Hearst Castle at San Simeon and collected pebbles on the beach to use as decoration for a coffee table we were planning to make. Sunday afternoon she drove back to Los Angeles, and with the help of my brother Steve, who was working there for the summer, she caught a plane for Connecticut, with little time to spare.
Bonny hurried through visits with her parents, two older brothers and school friends. I wrote Bonny asking if she would visit my parents at their farm near Buffalo on her way back, saying that they certainly would like to meet my future wife. This was as close as we had ever come to formally discussing marriage.
While visiting her brother Terry, Bonny casually mentioned that she might be getting married. Terry asked what she was going to wear and she replied, "I've got a new blue dress that Alan hasn't seen." Properly horrified, Terry took the next day off from work and he and his wife Sue took Bonny shopping. They picked out a knee-length white dress for her and Terry plunked a white hat on her head. Bonny put them in her suitcase and headed for Buffalo.
She had phoned my parents to tell them when she was arriving and they asked how they would recognize her, never having seen her picture. Bonny said she would be wearing a red sailor dress. My father picked her up at the airport, having left in the middle of a dinner my parents were giving for the local school board, of which my mother was a member. Bonny's face was as red as her dress when she and my father walked in on the party in the middle of dessert.
Everybody was bursting with questions, but my parents pushed them out the door as soon as possible and then starting giving Bonny the third degree about our relationship. Bonny asked, "Didn't Alan write?" I had written, but had said nothing about marriage. Bonny, with no official sanction, but with her back against the wall, finally admitted she had a wedding dress in her suitcase. My parents offered congratulations and got appropriately teary-eyed.
My mother immediately planned a tea to introduce Bonny to their friends, and consequently, asked her to stay several extra days, in spite of my violent protests over the telephone.
Bonny finally arrived back in Los Angeles, and we started planning a trip through the northwest for the two weeks before she had to return to teaching. We still had made no formal plans for getting married. Bonny claims I never proposed to her, while my feeling is that we had a meeting of the minds, which is the important thing. She discovered afterward, however, that I had filed her letters under "Marriage."
I was a member of a bowling team at IBM. Bonny went with me on awards night, and over drinks afterward, a coworker asked me what I was going to do on my vacation. My reply that I guessed I was getting married was the first indication to Bonny that it was really going to happen.
We discussed whether to get married at the beginning or end of the trip. I thought it would be more convenient at the end, but Bonny pointed out that our eastern relatives would feel better if we did it at the beginning. My brother Steve took us to dinner before we left and bought us a pup tent. We stowed it in my Volkswagen beetle along with our other equipment and started off.
The first night we stayed in a campground at Lake Tahoe and slept in our pup tent. Bonny laughed to herself as she paid a dime to take a shower the next morning, and watched the cobwebs in her shower stall. It was not her picture of a wedding morning. We dressed in sweatshirts and shorts and drove to Reno.
We stopped at the Park Wedding Chapel and made arrangements for an afternoon ceremony. Then we walked across the street to the marriage license bureau and waited there with several other couples since it was lunch hour. After obtaining our license and changing into our wedding clothes, we put another nickel into the parking meter and went back to the chapel.
Since we had no friends or relatives there, the chapel furnished two people to stand up for us. As we were ready to start the ceremony, I called time out since I couldn't find my best man. It turned out the best man was a very short girl and I had been looking over her head. The minister came out of an alcove, began talking in a friendly manner, and before we knew it the ceremony was half over.
We had a picture taken, changed back into our traveling clothes, had lunch at the Cal Neva Club, lost a dollar at keno, and were on our way to Crater lake where we spent our wedding night in our pup tent. Our wedding expenses were as follows:
$18.00 Dress
4.00 Hat
38.00 Two wedding rings
10.00 License
15.00 Chapel Fee
4.62 Telegrams to Family
30.00 Announcements
$119.62 Total
We both forgot to get any flowers.
When we got back from our honeymoon, we wrote Human Inventory to tell them we were married. In reply we received a form letter with the following typed in: "25,568 & 35,275. Congratulations!" In addition, the following sentence was checked on the letter: "Per your request, we are withdrawing your name from active status in the HUMAN INVENTORY." They did not say whether or not they were keeping track of the success of their matchmaking. Nor did we ever hear from them again.
As I write these words, we are still happily married. We do not know of any other married couple who met through a matching service in 1964. However, we are living proof that it worked at least once.
enjoyed reading your informative narrative
I look forward to reading more of your work.
m