CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Connie and Carl left Appleton behind them, they were on Highway 41 heading south, down the western side of Lake Winnebago. About halfway in their journey to Fond du Lac, they would bypass the city of Oshkosh. The drive was roughly forty miles in all, in the dark the whole way, of course, since the sun had set over an hour ago. It would be an easy drive and relatively smooth, thanks in part to the recent paving of the highway. Highway 41 was a major artery in central Wisconsin and rarely cut through the hamlets of these farmlands.
The traffic was expected to be light, since the cold weather kept a lot of people from going out this time of year. The heater in Carl’s car was up to the task, but it would be on high the whole way, since the temperature was dropping hourly; and it was, after all, a convertible, although the top was up, of course. The temperature was expected to fall into the teens that night, and it was already in the mid-twenties.
It was a clear sky, an open sky, over Wisconsin that night, and anyone who bothered to look up would be given the gift of a million stars. There really weren’t any big cities in central Wisconsin, and the lights from Oshkosh and the surrounding small towns didn’t create enough diffused light to knock out any stars. Without a blanket of clouds, the earth’s inhabitants in that part of the world were going to get colder that night, no doubt about that, but in exchange, nature gave them a truly spectacular view of the celestial constellations overhead.
The drive back would be different—a lot different—because they wouldn’t be driving all the way back to Appleton at a late hour. Instead, they’d told Ruby and Henry that they’d finish out the weekend with them. They loved their time together, and waking up to one of Ruby’s Sunday breakfasts was something they did about once a month. Ruby loved to pamper them, which was just fine with Connie and Carl. They had told Ruby and Henry not to wait up because it would be a late night and, also, not to worry.
This meant that the return trip would take them up the eastern side of Lake Winnebago, and it would be only a twenty-minute drive from Fond du Lac to Chilton, which was half the distance to Appleton. They would drive home Sunday afternoon after a lazy morning of eating and lounging with Ruby and Henry.
The party was at Schrinsky’s, a popular roadhouse on the east side of Fond du Lac on Highway 23. Club S, as the locals called it, was known for its dual reputation of offering great steak dinners and having a well-stocked late night bar. The other nice thing about Schrinsky’s was its party room in the back. That’s the room where the gang would meet. This party had been arranged by six guys in Carl’s vast circle of friends. They had lined up “The Destinations,” a really popular band in the area, to make it happen on the dance floor, and had set up a few holiday decorations, all funded by the two bucks they would charge each couple at the entrance. The turn-out in the first hour after the official start time assured them that this party would be a money-making proposition.
Connie and Carl pulled in just before eight o’clock. The gravel in the parking lot was united in a layer of ice, making it easy for the hundred-plus cars to maneuver into whatever parking space could be claimed without worrying about the slip and slide that mud and slush create in most unpaved lots in warmer times. Carl dropped Connie off at the brightly-lit side entrance to save her the walk, and hunted down a space. The big Schlitz sign over the door illuminated the entire parking lot. No one was standing outside, which was often the case on warm summer nights, but not on this night; the biting cold made sure of that.
Connie took a few steps inside the door and would wait on the threshold for Carl. She could have gone into the building to her friends, but she waited for Carl. She liked to walk into rooms on his arm. He made her feel like royalty, and it often gave her a flashback of the walk to the throne she had made at Chilton High School when she was the Homecoming Queen nearly eight years ago. Life felt special on Carl’s arm—that’s just the way it was for her.
She scanned the party room from the foyer. It was quite a party and clearly well underway. The joint was jumping, and Connie immediately spied a dozen of her close friends and waved back to them. Carl stepped in moments later, paid the cover charge, whispered something to her about her coat, helped her with it, shucked his, and stepped over to the coat-check closet. Thankfully, it was being managed by someone, a girl who looked like she might be in high school. She called him “sir” and took their coats, following his instructions to hang them in a distant corner, out of the way of all the jostling and stuffing of even more coats that would probably come later, which was sure to swell the mass of wool and fur to pressing proportions.
Carl took Connie’s arm and, together, they ventured into the swirling currents of their friends, where everyone had a drink in hand and offered a flurry of greetings and shout outs that wouldn’t slow down for twenty minutes. Connie heard a couple of people yell out, “Connie and Carl are here!” as she got swept into the euphoria of hugging and air kissing dozens of friends that converged on the two of them. Carl was busy shaking hand after hand. Everyone around them was calling out “Merry Christmas!” It was, after all, the season, and Carl and Connie shared their joy in seeing so many friends. He was glowing, she could tell, from the excitement and pleasure of being in the midst of it all. Within a minute, her arm was free from his as he was engulfed by his buddies, and she, too, was surrounded by her girlfriends. The party was on!
Within an hour, the party room was standing room only. The room was warm, and the dance floor was hot. Bodies bumped and twirled, and glasses clinked, with their icy contents swirling, and gaiety filled the room more than the smoke from the cigarettes that rested in almost every hand on the perimeter of the dance floor. Everywhere laughter rose and fell like a rollercoaster, abundant on the heels of countless stories and pure exuberance for life.
The exhilaration over expectations arising from the ripening peacetime was unrestrained, dreams and hopes were boundless, and you could hear this in every conversation. There was a cacophony of optimism spewing out of every voice. Party plans were made, deals went down, and careers switched to another track, always with a bigger and bigger promise for the future, one that never looked so bright. Club S was a happening place, and everyone would have said the same thing: it seemed that everything was right and nothing could go wrong. The band played on and on, and they played all the hits right up to midnight, including the ones made famous by the greats like Johnny Mercer, Nat King Cole and, of course, Frank Sinatra.
That party at Schrinsky’s was what everyone recalled years later as the perfect Christmas party, loaded with lighthearted party revelers who danced and danced and danced. For at least three couples, it was the tipping point that moved them into marriage. And, for everyone, it was an evening that captured the collective joy shared by friends, a joy that was accentuated with every note from the band and rose and rose with the delirium of the beat and rhythm of the room to an escalation that made time fly, as it always does when you’re having fun.
In a way, it’s a shame that time flies when you’re having so much fun. It’s such an injustice. It makes the good times so fleeting and in such stark contrast to the bad times, those times we all know to varying degrees, when it seems like the clock stops and you’ll never get through the boredom, out of the doldrums, or—worse—through something painful, if that be your fate. Pain can make temporary seem like forever.
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