March 30, 1946
“Hello Honey, I hope this letter finds you feeling well. As for me I’m the same as usual. Lonely and sad. I guess I’ll go on being lonely and sad until I get out of this outfit. I only have 63 days to go.”
The words were those of then 19-year-old naval officer Norman Johnson to his ‘honey’ in Bellville, 16-year-old Lucinda Yarger.
The courtship began on a Saturday night at a local square dance held at the IOOF Lodge Hall in Johnsville when Johnson was 15 and Lucinda was 12 years old. Johnson recalled the evening he first met Lucinda who had been taken to the dance by her older sisters.
“They were short one couple for the dance floor so I went over to her and asked her to dance with me,” said Johnson. She said, “No.” It wasn’t until the next winter dance that his persistence paid off and she accepted his request to dance, the couple became regular dance partners.
Because Yarger was from Bellville and Johnson was from Johnsville and the square dance was held in the winter, the young sweethearts did not meet up again until the summer when Johnson would make his way down to Bellville to catch one of the free picture shows held in town. There she was one afternoon, 13-year-old Lucinda alongside her mother watching a show.
Lucindas’ older sister had written her mother and warned her that the younger Yarger had begun to notice boys. “You better watch Lucinda, she is sweet on that boy,” she stated in a letter.
Johnson, determined to get close to Lucinda, asked permission to sit alongside her, under the watchful eye of her mother he was allowed.
“We held hands when her mother wasn’t looking,” said Johnson smiling. “After the show I asked for permission to walk her home.”
Yarger was the third youngest in a family of eight daughters, and the family lived in Bellville on East Street. She recalled the walk home. As they held hands she ushered her mother and sisters into the house so she could say goodbye to Norman as they stood by the garage. “We kissed a lot,” she said.
The storybook romance blossomed. As Johnson did not own or have access to a car, he would figure out ways to hitch a ride to Bellville to spend time with the girl of his dreams. The couple would see a movie or go to the ice cream shop and have their favorite, a vanilla shake which back in those days was 35 cents.
In 1944 Yarger began her freshman year at 14, Johnson, age 17 entered the service. His parents and her saw him off at the train station with a kiss and a promise to write him each and every day. His first stop was Great Lakes, Illinois for boot camp then off to Fort Pierce, Florida for hand-to-hand combat training where Johnson recalled the sergeant was “the meanest guy you ever knew.”
“When I came home I realized it was his training and being tough on me that was the reason I was alive,” Johnson added.
There were many times in the service that Johnson was not sure he would make it back to the young girl he called ‘honey’. As he stated in one of his letters back to her, “Don’t cry so much over me for I don’t want that pretty face stained over me.”
Just as promised when he shipped out, Lucinda wrote him a letter every day; and though he wasn’t able to receive his mail as often as he would have liked, when he did receive mail it was an armload. It was like reading a book when the mail arrived and there they were, letter after letter from Lucinda ‘Cindy’ as he called her. She was still in school at the time would tell him of her days in school and just being at home missing him.
“I worked a lot to earn the money for stationary and stamps; stamps were three cents at that time,” said Lucinda. She also did a lot of babysitting and laundry for a neighbor to earn her money. “I wrote other service men too who didn’t have any family, but not as often as Norman, not like that.” Johnson admitted the other fellows were quite jealous to see the letters he received regularly, “It made me fall in love with her,” Johnson tearfully shared.
Johnson was gone for over two years, serving in the Naval Amphibian Forces aboard the U.S.S. Lenoir and traveling all over the South Seas Islands. Though the South Pacific was his home away from home, his heart and mind was back in Bellville as is portrayed in an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Lucinda on May 1946.
”You know I love you without me writing and telling you but I think I’ll remind you again as you’ll know it for sure when you see me,” he wrote. And soon after that letter was written he returned, landing in Portland, Oregon July 1946. His first phone call to his mother, the second to his ‘honey’. “He said he wanted to love me to pieces,” shared Lucinda.
He arrived in Mansfield from Chicago by train at about 10:30 p.m. and tried to hitch a ride with no luck. So he boarded a greyhound bus with his military duffle bag and everything he owned. The bus driver woke him about 2:30 in the morning and as he rose out of his seat to depart he stated the driver called everyone to attention to make sure it was known to them that he (Johnson) had just returned home from the war and hadn’t been home in over two years. “I still get emotional thinking about he did that for me, wanted them to know,” he said.
But back to Yarger and Johnson.
“I knew I had to marry her,” said Johnson.
Lucinda remembered, ”I said absolutely!”
The couple was married at the Methodist Church in Springfield by Reverend Smith, with the preachers wife, a church cleaning lady and Johnsons’ brother Bill serving as witnesses. They honeymooned while visiting his aunt and uncle and also visited the zoo. “She loved the monkeys,” Johnson said. From there they moved to an apartment in Johnsville for about 6 months and ultimately buying a house in Bellville where his wife worked at the Dairy Bar and Johnson worked at the steel mill as a crane operator for 42 years.
During that period Johnson also served as a fireman and Chief of Police for 8 ½ years. The couple had three children, a son named Dean and two daughters Judy and Joy. In 1959, the couple moved to Madison where they still reside.
On August 24th the couple will celebrate their 67th anniversary.
Lucinda summed it all up to their simple but effective way of getting along. “Our secret is we do a lot of kissing,” she said, “We never went to bed mad, we always kissed good night and good morning.”
“We just clicked, right from the start,” said Norman. “She always gave me a kiss when I left for work and when I got home.
