I met Jo Anne on a double date. She was working for the City of Cincinnati Playground Department, in her Senior Year at High School. She was working with a good friend of mine, Stan Needleman, and he had decided that he wanted to date Jo Anne and wanted to double date. I didn’t have a date, so he asked Jo to check with her sister Claire, and Claire came up with a girl who was closer to my age. And then I got interested in Jo Anne and started dating her.
Jo Anne was part of the fraternity and sorority group, the Round Towners, and I had never been involved with them except as opposition in sports events. They weren’t people that I cared about one way or another; they weren’t friends. I can remember playing football against the Round Towner Team, which included a fellow named Bob Maltz, who played in a cashmere sweater! I did own one cashmere sweater that I had bought out of my own money, and no way would I have played football in it.
Jo Anne was very different; she was very rebellious and always fighting with her parents – she wore blue jeans that dragged on the ground and were shredded. Not what I would have thought a likely way to dress, considering the people I knew she was associated with.
She wasn’t what I expected; I liked her rebelliousness. We got along well. At that point I had just broken up with my first and only prior girlfriend, Charlotte. I had asked Charlotte to marry me, and she declined. I realized there was no point in pursuing this any further, and I started looking about.
Jo Anne and I dated that summer, and then she went to Radcliffe College in the fall, where we continued with a long-distance relationship. When I was at Ft. Monmouth, I could get a three-day pass and go to Boston and get back for mid-morning reveille. It very fortunate that there was a milk train going from New York to Ft. Monmouth that would get there in time. After Freshman year, Jo Anne went to Europe, and I met her on her flight back from Europe. She and her parents were there, and we spent a few days together in New York.
Jo Anne and I decided that we should spend some time getting to know each other better, to see if things between us were going to work. Also, in the back of my mind, I thought about how my mother had always said that age 25 was the age to get married, that she wasn’t going to raise any bachelors. I was 23, so I thought it was time to get on with my life.
Jo Anne was interested in occupational therapy, and I was interested in getting a further degree in business. I don’t know how motivated I was to go to graduate school for the education; I think I was motivated because I had nothing that I knew I could do at this point; I had to earn a living. I didn’t like sales, so I had to figure out something to do. I did like accounting, and I thought an MBA would help me along.
We looked for schools that offered degrees for us both. There was the University of Texas, someplace in California, Boston, and Washington U. I didn’t think I could get into Harvard, and Washington U was not that far from Cincinnati. I don’t think I was ready to move far away from my family. At that point there were no tests you could take for graduate school. Washington U was just starting out with an MBA program, so it seemed like a good school for me. Most of their courses were at night; this proved a little difficult the first semester because I ended up with one course at nine in the morning, some during the day, and others at night.
I found a room in somebody’s home; Jo Anne was in a dorm, and we spent a lot of time together and got to know each other. We decided to marry, and we were married in June of ’55, at HUC.
On our honeymoon, we spent the night at the Vernon Manor. We took Jo Anne’s father’s car and switched to Walter’s car at the Vernon Manor. The next morning, we drove to see Deets [Jo Anne’s cousin Duffy] who couldn’t come to our wedding because she had just given birth to her daughter Lisa. So we had breakfast at Deets’ and then drove down to Gatlinburg for the rest of our honeymoon.
After we got married, we drove back to St. Louis using Jo Anne’s father’s Dodge; we had the mattress on the back seat. We took over Bob and Ruthie Mendelsohn’s apartment, just off Skinker, on Northwood. The first block off Skinker was an empty lot, which the caretaker was using as a garden. We got the house adjacent to that.
Initially, we had no furniture, and we didn’t have a car. After 3 months of marriage, my parents gave us $300 so we could buy one: a Nash Rambler, which we bought from someone in Webster Groves. I used to drive to the Park Ride and take the bus downtown for work.
The Felson Family 