Lightning courtship produces enduring marriage

As whirlwind courtships go, this was a tornado.

Ken Lewis met Carolyn Boyette on a Monday, secured a date with her on Wednesday and had an engagement ring on her finger by Friday.

It was 1952 and Carolyn was visiting a friend in Sumter, South Carolina. The friend said, “‘Let’s stop by and see Kenny Lewis, he just got back from Korea,’ ” recalled Carolyn.

They stopped by his home, looked at his pictures from Korea and went on their way.

After they left, Ken, then 19, had a conversation with his mom. “I was kind of excited,” he said. “I said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl!’ You can’t print my mom’s response.”

It turns out Carolyn worked at the same dime store as Ken’s mother, and his mom knew Carolyn already had a failed teenage marriage and was the mother of a little boy.

That didn’t deter Ken one bit. “She was so sexy in those blue jeans!” he said sighing.

After dropping out of school to work at 14, he’d joined the Army at 17 so he’d have regular paycheck to send home to his widowed mother.

“I’d never been outside of South Carolina, and they put me on a boat to Honolulu,” he said.

From there he went on to Japan and finally Korea. “I was trained as a corpsman, but when I got to Korea they sent me up to heavy weapons – the big guns. I learned real quick.”

Ken was gone for 2 1/2 years, and when he met Carolyn the day he came home on leave, he knew he’d found someone who could make him feel at home wherever he went.

“I wanted to get my hooks in her, so I could take her with me,” he said.

He dropped by the dime store Tuesday and invited her to a drive-in movie the next day. While there he admired Carolyn’s ring.

“I wore my mother’s wedding ring,” she said. “He asked to see it.”

When she was busy with a customer, Ken said, “I stuck her ring in my pocket.”

Then he slipped out to the jeweler next door and ordered an engagement ring. He sauntered back and returned her ring before Carolyn realized what had happened.

When he picked her up for the movie the next day, he went in and met her son, Ray.

“He was standing up in his crib,” Ken recalled.

However, neither of them can recall the name of the movie they saw. “What movie?” he said, and they both laughed.

He’d asked her out to another movie on Friday, and that’s when he pulled the engagement ring out of his pocket and proposed.

“I was shocked!” Carolyn said. But she wasn’t speechless. She said, “Yeah! I’ll take the ring and I’ll marry you.”

In their West Spokane living room, she looked at her white-haired husband. “Wherever he went, I was going to go.”

That’s not to say the road to the altar was smooth. After his leave, Ken was ordered to report to the Presidio in San Francisco, and he was not happy about it.

“I screamed and hollered about the family I was trying to put together,” he recalled.

The Army didn’t care, but Ken found a way back home. He discovered if he re-enlisted he could not only choose his next assignment but would receive a signing bonus. So he re-enlisted and was sent to Fort Jackson, back in South Carolina.

“We danced every Friday and Saturday night,” Carolyn said.

But one of those dances didn’t end well. “His buddy had a bottle of white lightning,” she recalled. “I’d never tasted it, but I wanted to. Ken said, ‘You’re not going to taste that.’ ”

Big mistake.

“Well, you don’t tell me what to do, so I tried it,” said Carolyn. “He was so mad he didn’t speak to me or dance with me the whole night.”

It took awhile, but they eventually made up and married on April 15, 1953.

Ken adopted Ray and they were finally a family, which meant everything to them. Carolyn’s mother had died when she was 11 and she was raised by her grandparents. Ken was raised by a foster mother. They both longed for an intact family.

In June 1955, Carolyn gave birth to Patti, and a few months later Ken was sent to Germany. Soon she was able to join him. “I’d never been outside South Carolina,” she said.

Ken will never forget his first sight of her at the airport.

“She showed up in Munich dragging two kids and all of their luggage. She was wore out,” he said, shaking his head. “I think she was asleep before we got to the motel.”

He let her rest. “He walked the floor all night with our daughter,” Carolyn said.

In 1956, a son, Bob, was born, and another son, Brad, completed the family in 1962.

Times were tense for all of them when Ken was ordered to Vietnam.

“I was assigned to a South Vietnamese unit,” he recalled. “I got hit by shrapnel.”

He rolled up his sleeve to show what once had been a shark tattoo on his arm was now mostly obliterated by scars.

His unit went on a routine patrol without him while he waited to be shipped home.

“They were ambushed 400 yards from the fort – just wiped out.” His voice broke and tears slowly slipped down his cheeks.

“Eighty-seven men – gone. Not one made it back and if I hadn’t been wounded I would have been with them.”

That’s why when he found out his son Ray had enlisted at 18 and had received orders for Vietnam, he put his foot down.

He called a friend in the Pentagon and said, “There’s no way I’m going to let my son go to Vietnam – send me instead. I will go back.”

And he did.

His son was sent to Alaska, and Ken did another tour in Vietnam.

When he returned, they moved to Moscow, Idaho, where he taught ROTC at the University of Idaho before retiring from the military. He then worked for GTE for 16 years before retiring and moving to Spokane.

A shadow box filled with military medals and ribbons hangs in the living room of their home, but it’s Ken’s acts of service as a husband and father that prompted Carolyn to say, “He’s my best friend and he’s my hero.”

And 62 years after he married the girl he so impulsively proposed to, Ken smiled and said, “She’s still a keeper.”