Sandy Peters, 1953

My friend Sandy is having some health problems and I’ve been thinking about her a lot.  I thought about her last week when we celebrated Oysterville’s 160^th because she had been here on the occasion of our Centennial Celebration in 1954!  Unlike our latest salute to our founding, the Centennial was a Big Deal – costumes and speeches and displays and fol-de-rol.  Also, it was held in the summertime so folks could get here from afar.  Sandy and I came up from Stanford where we were roommates.

I don’t remember much about our actual first meeting.  We were assigned to the same dorm, Roble Hall, which was one of the two freshmen women’s dorms.  In those days, all undergraduate women at Stanford were required to live on campus and freshmen women were segregated from everyone else.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe for orientation/indoctrination purposes?  I do remember (vaguely) some of those pep rallies or other meetings in the dining hall and I also remember (even more vaguely) that Dianne Feinstein (who was then Goldman) was one of our proctors or hall monitors or something.  I think she was a sophomore.

Sandy and Sydney, Graduation Day 1957

Sandy represented a whole new world to me.  She came from Bainbridge Island where her family were founding members of the country club and had a sailboat that they lived aboard in the summers when they sailed throughout the San Juans.  Sandy had been a debutante and had “come out” (in Seattle I think) – in my mind the only deb I’ve ever known, though that’s probably not true given Stanford and all.

I remember visiting her home during the summer of our sophomore year.  Her room was up some rickety stairs, sort of ‘off’ from the house and I remember that an owl (Archimedes?) lived in the chimney of her fireplace.  Everyone in the family played a musical instrument and they had ‘concerts’ at night.  Her dad played the saw!  I loved it!

It was Sandy who taught me the words to Lewis Carol’s “Jabberwocky” and who put up with my off-key harmony on “I’m A Very Reluctant Dragon.”   We went up to the Hungry i in San Francisco to see the Kingston Trio and Josh White, Mort Sahl and Professor Irwin Corey.  We double-dated brothers Jim and Morgan Howell whom we eventually married making our children first cousins.  They turned out to be starter-marriages – mine lasting only four years, but hers lasting close to forty.

Sandy at Rosatti’s, 2007

As it turns out, I’m the one who now lives in Washington and Sandy is in California.  We don’t see one another all that often, but we “keep up” and, though neither of us have been active Stanford alumnae, we did go to our 50^th reunion in 2007 together and made the obligatory trip out to Rosatti’s, the (still going strong) watering hole of our youth.

Since then, she and her husband Whalen have been up here and we down there.  Somehow, though, as the trip gets longer with the years, the memories get more vivid.  Hooray for a lifetime of friendship, Sandy!  Get well quick.  I’m sure there are more adventures in store for us.