A Worried Mother

Many memories are recalled and this is one that has been passed down in the family these many years. It was apparently not unusual for the basketball team to be delayed because of the weather. It happened in the thirties, too. My husband, Rev. Dr. Ralph Ley '36 '59, was the manager of the team. When they played Aurora, a big snow storm closed the roads back to the campus. We were often snowbound in those days. On this occasion, the team stopped at the YMCA in Waukegan. The exemplary son that Ralph was, he wrote his regular Sunday letter home to his mother in Cincinnati. When his mother saw the postmark from Waukegan, IL (also known as the "marriage mill of the Midwest"), she was afraid to open it and saved it until Ralph's father returned home. What a sigh of relief! That brown-eyed coed from Belleville had not led their son astray after all!

Some years later we were married--for 54 years.

Ruth (Flueckinger) Ley '38