This is the (two-part) story of an odd couple, two quirky, independent people who spent over half their married years living apart although they never got divorced. It is the story of my parents: David Treadwell and Sally (Kenniston) Treadwell.
My mother grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire, one of four daughters of a country doctor. Her father William B. Kenniston earned his degree at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin in 1896. He wrote and presented the Class Poem at graduation. Her mother Inez attended Bradford Junior College.
The valedictorian of her high school class, my mother majored in English at Wellesley College. She demonstrated her maverick bent early on by refusing to get her picture taking for the Wellesley yearbook because it was “too establishment.”
My father grew up in Kearny, New Jersey, the oldest of three sons of a high school chemistry teacher. His father Theodore Treadwell went to Harvard, and as a teaching assistant, once introduced Thomas Edison at a lecture. His mother Rebecca did not attend college.
A mathematical whiz, my father studied chemical engineering at MIT where he performed on the flying rings on the gymnastics team and took up the game of bridge, which became his lifelong passion.
They met at a wedding at which they were both members of the wedding party. My mother, never one to let facts interfere with the telling of a good story, later declared that he was so handsome she couldn’t not go to bed with him the very first night they met.
He later asked her to marry him while they were walking across the bridge at Boothbay Harbor here in Maine. She declined saying, “I can’t marry you; you’re a bridge player.”
She relented in due time, and they spent their first years living in New York
City during the Great Depression. She worked for Life magazine, and he worked for a chemical company. She made $38 a week; he made $36 a week. He later said, “I was just happy to have a job.”
My father spent the bulk of his career working for DuPont, which meant the family (I had an older sister and a younger brother) moved around often. In 1944, we lived in Richland, Washington. My dad was granted leave from DuPont to work on the Manhattan Project in Hanford; my mother worked on a peace newsletter. They did share some good times out there, acting in an amateur theater group, taking hikes and photographs in the great outdoors and enjoying the antics of my two siblings and me.
We moved to Montclair, New Jersey after the war and then, a few years later, to Parkersburg, West Virginia in 1950. The schools were weak there, although some good teachers could be found in the midst of mediocrity.
Our family life consisted of playing games and telling jokes, which got ever racier as we grew into our teens We did take some good vacations. The most memorable family vacation occurred when I was about 13 and we went on a three-week trip road trip out west. Cars had no air-conditioning at this time. Our mother kept wanting us to stop and see memorable sights. We three kids were most interested in whether a motel had a swimming pool. Going down the Grand Canyon on mules was the highlight of that trip.
My father had taken a hiatus from bridge during the first fifteen years of the marriage; he had probably promised my mother to do that. But he began to play in local games in Parkersburg and in regional tournaments in the midwest. His stellar game led to a gig writing a bridge column for the local newspaper; he also directed some local tournaments. My mother got into her church events and engaging with her good friends. They shared less time together, although they were always supportive of us kids. They did enjoy playing long running games of Scrabble, although with their own rules. They used eight tiles rather than seven and gave only eight points for a Q and Z, rather than the standard 10.
In 1958 we moved to Wilmington, Delaware, the ultimate stopping point for many executives at DuPont. My dad quickly found competitive bridge games in Delaware and nearby Philadelphia. He began playing in national tournaments, many of them with a top women player named Evelyn. In fact, they became arguably the best “mixed” pair (one man, one woman) in the United States. That was good for his bridge career, but not so good for the marriage.
My mother tried to be a good sport and play in some duplicate bridge games, but that just wasn’t her thing. In addition to her church activities, she liked reading books and listening to opera and crocheting rugs. We could sense the tension growing between them, especially when he would head off for a week to play in a national bridge tournament with Evelyn.
In the spring of 1965, my dad and I went out to play golf. On the last tee, he broke down into tears and told me that the marriage was over or, more accurately, that they just couldn’t live together. He said he had wanted to make it work, but that it just wouldn’t. I was devastated.
(NOTE: In Part 2, I will highlight the last 35 years of my parents “marriage,” an extended period during which they lived different lives in different states.)
David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns. dtreadw575@aol.com
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