Courting

My parents Marilyn Hope Johnson and Maurice Earl Ford Jr. met at Fullerton Union High School in Southern California.  Marilyn was the first-born daughter of pioneer orange ranchers in Yorba Linda, CA and Maury (or Fordo) was the only son of parents with deep roots in Orange County and in North America.  On his father’s side, Maury’s great-grandparents were founders of the City of Placentia in Orange County, as well as being some of the first orange ranchers in the area.  His ancestors on his mother’s side landed in Massachusetts in the early 1630s.

I don’t know exactly when Marilyn and Maury (or Fordo as she affectionately called him) met.  However, in her senior yearbook The Pleaides (1941), I found pictures of both of them on the yearbook staff pages. Maury was the Business Manager and Marilyn was an Art Editor.   In his inscription to her, he wrote, “It’s been swell working on the staff with you.  Don’t forget the annual never would have come out if we hadn’t checked all that proof that night,” signed Ford.  We can only imagine what checking all the proof “that night” really meant. 

Their actual courtship was relatively short.  Like most young men of this era, Maury was called to military service and enlisted on 4 September 1942 in the US Naval Reserve, a short year after their graduation from high school.  He became a member of the famed SeaBees and remained in the service until 16 July 1946, when he was released from the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn. 

Maury was due to be shipped to the Pacific when the bombs were dropped over Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  He always said he wished he’d gone to sea, but it was not to be.  Instead he invited Marilyn to come back to New York to get married.  She left home, alone and without food for the trip, aboard a train that traveled across the US to Brooklyn.  They were married on 22 August 1945, setting up housekeeping in a brownstone in Brooklyn, near the Naval Shipyards. When they returned to California after his discharge, they started their family. Starting in 1947, when I was born, they had six children: me (Marilee), Judy, Gale, Dennis, John and Janis.

Marilyn and Maury had a long life together. They were married 1 day shy of 50 years, when, on 21 August 1995, Maury passed away from the complications of a stroke.  Marilyn lived another 22 years, passing away from old age also on 21 August, but in 2017. 

I’ll never forget her last words to him as she leaned over and rested her forehead on his arm, “Oh Fordo”, the two of them surrounded by most of their grown children and a grandson.