No Ordinary Joes (48 page)

“I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back,” he vowed.

On their last night together, they bid each other a tearful farewell. “I don’t think we should contact each other,” she proposed. “It would just be too painful.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that,” he responded.

After he watched her walk back into her parents’ house, he drove away, but instead of heading home, he headed south toward California. He drove all night, and the next morning when her plane landed at San Francisco Airport, he was waiting to greet her when she headed for her connecting flight.

“You got away from me once,” he said. “I can’t let it happen again.”

Her heart told her to get in his pickup and head back to Oregon with him. “All I thought about on the flight down here was being with you,” she admitted. “But I can’t do it. At least not now. I have to go home and see if there’s anything to be saved in my marriage.”

Once again they said a tearful good-bye. Bob headed back to Oregon and Barbara flew east to her husband.

“Bobby, I want you to meet me at the Holiday Inn in Georgetown tomorrow at six o’clock,” said Barbara. She sat nervously across the family room
from her twenty-two-year-old son. A senior at the University of South Carolina, he was home on vacation.

“Why?” he asked.

Barbara cleared her throat. “Because I’m going to introduce you to the man I’m going to leave your father for,” she replied.

Bobby stared in disbelief. Had he heard her right? She’d always been high-spirited, a bit of a kidder. “Say that again,” he said.

Barbara took a deep breath and repeated the words. “This is for real,” she added.

Bobby studied her face. Clearly, she was serious. But she’d always been the dutiful wife and good mother, living in her husband’s world and by his rules. “Who is this guy?” he asked.

Barbara paused. Bobby vaguely knew that his mother had been married before, but how could she possibly explain to her son the history she shared with Bob Palmer and the passion that had been reignited? “I want you to meet him and see for yourself who he is,” she answered.

When she’d first returned from Oregon, she initially tried to brush her rekindled feelings for Bob into a back corner of her mind and heart. She had lived her whole life doing what others expected of her and she saw too many barriers in the way—they lived on opposite sides of the country; she couldn’t imagine giving up her life to go live in a single-wide trailer; she didn’t think she could ever get up the courage to confess to her husband.

But the pull to be with Bob was relentless. Barbara had decided to enlist her daughter’s support. She invited Lynn upstairs to her bedroom, where she went into a closet and pulled out a shoe box. Inside the box was another box, and inside that box was still another locked box. Barbara opened it to reveal pictures of her and Bob, as well as other little mementos. Lynn had never seen her mother look so happy or excited. It had always been a mystery to her why she’d stayed with her father. Lynn was no longer living at home, and she volunteered her address as a place where Bob could write to Barbara. In the months ahead there was a steady stream of letters back and forth, as well as phone calls. Once, when Barbara’s
husband was out of town on business, Bob got in his car and drove forty-six hours straight through across the country to see her. They spent five days in a motel room. When he went for a physical shortly after returning home, he still had rug burns on his knees and elbows. The doctor inquired how he got them, and when Bob confessed, the doctor shook his hand.

Sitting across from his mother in the family room, Bobby had never seen her look so resolved, so self-assured.

“Does Dad know about all this?” he asked.

Her smile disappeared. Yes, she had told him. At first, she’d just told him how unhappy she was and she was considering leaving. He responded by telling her he wanted to save their marriage, and asked for a month and promised to make changes. He took her out to dinner, bought her gifts, and treated her nicer than he had in years. But it was too little, too late. She called Bob and asked him if he’d marry her if she left Kunhardt. “Yesterday,” he responded.

“I told your dad last night while we were out on the boat that I was leaving him to go back to Bob Palmer,” she said.

“What did he say?”

“The first thing he said was, ‘Who’s going to help me with the boat?’ ”

Bobby rolled his eyes. “What about the house and boat and all of that?” he asked.

“I’m giving everything to your dad,” she replied. “I just want out.”

“Wow, this guy must have money,” Bobby ventured.

“Not at all.”

“You guys must be really in love.”

Barbara smiled. “I can’t wait for you to meet him tomorrow. He’s special. You’ll see.”

“I’m staying at the house tonight,” said Bobby. “I don’t trust Dad with all those guns.”

In July 1971, Bob flew across the country to bring Barbara back to the West Coast. Despite his nerves, the meetings with Bobby and Lynn went well, both of them giving their blessings to the relationship.

Some of Barbara’s friends thought she was nuts to run off with a man who couldn’t afford an engagement ring. “I can’t imagine leaving someone who won a national sailing championship,” said one friend. They also thought she was being naive; she had not hired a lawyer and she had signed everything over to Kunhardt. “I admitted to him that I’d slept with Bob and he was going to charge me with adultery if I tried going after property,” she explained.

For Barbara, physically leaving had not gone as badly as she’d feared. All she was taking were a couple of suitcases packed with clothes and an old sewing machine, which she put in the backseat of a five-year-old Chevy Nova. The morning she left, Kunhardt rode with her to the Holiday Inn, stopping a block from the motel. As he got out of the car, he threw two $100 bills at her and then walked away. She and Bob didn’t even get out of the state before they stopped at a motel and made love the rest of the day.

They stopped at a drugstore in Ohio, where Barbara bought two imitation gold wedding rings until they got something more permanent. Instead of returning to Oregon, they rented a small one-bedroom apartment in San Mateo, south of San Francisco. Bob took a job working three and a half days a week for a drywall company that installed movable partitions in buildings. Barbara stayed home and clipped coupons and decorated the apartment. For her, the romance and affection Bob gave her more than made up for the material things she’d left behind. She felt that for the first time in her life, she had a say in decisions. She had money, though not much, to spend however she wanted. When Bob wasn’t at work, they spent almost every possible moment together.

They held hands everywhere they went; Bob opened doors for her and wrote her love notes and cards. His manners were almost Victorian. He regularly told friends that his main purpose in life was to make Barbara happy. Because she’d been an officer’s wife and lived in a big house, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to measure up financially, so he took a part-time job selling lawn mowers for Sears. Barbara constantly reassured him how happy she was. It wasn’t unusual for them to make love in the morning
before he went to work, then when he came home, and then again before they went to sleep. They remarried on August 12, 1972.

One of the things that impressed Barbara the most was how handy and practical Bob was. He could fix anything. If he was driving down the street and heard the engine ping, he’d pull over and fix it on the spot. If a door squeaked, he’d take off the door and replace the hinge. For Christmas, he bought her son a screw gun.

The only gray cloud in their life came from Marty, who had married his high-school sweetheart and was now living in the Bay Area too. It wasn’t that Marty didn’t like Barbara, it was just that she was stealing such a big part of his father’s heart and time. Marty’s long hair and his being stoned a lot didn’t help his relationship with his father.

Bob was constantly amazed at Barbara’s positive attitude. He marveled at the way she started singing as soon as her feet hit the floor every morning and the fact that she kept separate envelopes of money for furniture, dishes, bedding, clothes, and other expenses, just as she’d done when they were first married in 1941. When he got home from work she’d excitedly show him her purchases for the day. It might be a salt-and-pepper set or a TV tray. She told him that when she was married to Kunhardt, she’d go shopping with no intent to buy because she already had everything she needed. They traveled frequently to Oregon on long weekends to visit old friends.

In 1977, Bob and Barbara moved back to Medford. He wanted to be closer to the mountains and rivers he’d loved so much as a kid. With his Navy pension and the disability pay he was now collecting, he figured they’d have enough money to live comfortably, especially after he started receiving Social Security in a few years. Plus, every time he drove through the Hunter’s Point neighborhood in San Francisco and saw all the blacks, he’d usually say the same thing: “I hate those people.” Medford was a lily-white community.

Soon after moving back to Oregon, Bob suffered his second heart attack. The cardiologist told him he needed to slow down, so he and Barbara
started to play golf regularly and bought a camper to take trips. Barbara was a faithful follower of
All My Children;
so that she wouldn’t miss any episodes while they were on the road, Bob hooked up an antenna on the camper and always made sure they stopped in a place with good reception.

It wasn’t too long after the heart attack that Bob received a jolt of another kind—Barbara’s father apologized to him. For almost forty years Mr. Koehler had held firm to his belief that Bob wasn’t good enough for his daughter, but after seeing how happy Barbara was now, and the adoration, love, and respect that Bob lavished on her, he pulled Bob aside.

“I was wrong,” he admitted.

Because the war was responsible for his long separation from Barbara, he wanted to be able to show her a part of that experience, so in 1988 he took her to Penang to the place where he’d spent the first four months of his imprisonment—the Convent on Light Street. After the war, it became a highly respected school for girls again. For several months he’d been exchanging letters with Sister Francis de Sales, the director of the school. He’d even made a charitable contribution to the convent. It was an emotional return as he visited the classroom where he had been held and saw all the names of the crew memorialized on a plaque. He cried as he listened to Sister de Sales introduce him to the students, teachers, alumni, and local dignitaries:

In 1990, Bob and Barbara moved to Ocean Pines, Maryland. Bob wasn’t all that keen on moving to the East Coast, but he went along with it because
he knew that Barbara wanted to be closer to her two children and four grandkids. Making her happy continued to be the most important thing in his life. He often expressed this love in writing, as he did in a letter to friends in 1998: