THAD AND HARRIETT ABELL, NORTH PERRY, OHIO, 1938

My parents were secretly married in 1938. They eloped to Alexandria, Virginia, while escorting a class trip to Washington, DC. No one knew. At that time in Ohio there were rules forbidding married couples from teaching in the same schools. Eventually they were discovered and my father was fired. But for two years they had kept their secret safe, which was not easy in a small village like Mowrystown, Ohio.

Two documents survive to tell the story of their courtship . One is the photograph of them at Lake Erie made by my grandfather Floyd Strong Lockwood, our family's first photographer.

The other is a love letter discovered in the family Bible by my niece Mary, a Methodist minister, in 1999. The letter was in an envelope addressed by a child. My father had arranged that to conceal from the Mowrystown postmaster that he was writing to my mother. His handwriting would have given him away.