All I knew about Dr. Becker was what I learned in two seventy-five-minute classes held twice a week for fifteen weeks in the fall of 1967.
The only thing I knew about his family was they were expecting a foreign exchange student to arrive within a couple of weeks after I completed my junior year speech class. I learned more during my third year of teaching in Plainwell, scattered bits and pieces during my marriage to Ruth, and my final revelation occurred in the summer of 2023. If you’re trying to do the math, that’s a total of fifty-six years.
Ruth and I eloped in September of 1971. Sometime during that school year, a new substitute teacher arrived on the scene in Plainwell. His name was David Becker. He was a high school classmate of Ruth, graduating with her in June of 1965. Ruth went on to Michigan State and David to a college out west to follow his dream. I’ve forgotten his course of study, but he needed to earn his doctorate to become employable. He was back home in Plainwell for a couple of months and took on substitute teaching duties to earn some money. My Dr. Becker was his father.
The Beckers lived in a large Victorian home on East Bridge Street near the Kalamazoo River. David told Ruth that his dad had hired him to paint the house while he was home.
Ruth and I planned to paint our house on Kalamazoo’s Stockbridge Avenue during our first summer as a married couple. It was a two-story Victorian built in 1898, and I think it sported its original paint job which prompted Ruth’s insistence that we paint.
I bought the house during my second year of teaching, and she offered advice regarding its décor. Once we married, she had several more ideas. Painting the outside was just one.
The two of us did most of the interior work. Ruth’s dad built a couple of closets for us, and helped me do some minor repair work, but Ruth and I did the rest. Since David Becker was trying to earn some extra cash, we hired him to scrape the loose paint off our house before we painted it. It was a good deal for all three of us.
Over the years, Ruth attended a few of her high school class reunions. I met some of her classmates while teaching in Plainwell. She asked me if I wanted to go with her, but I knew she’d have more fun without me, so I declined. When she got home, she shared things she thought might interest me. Who showed up, what they discussed, those that had passed, things like that.
David Becker, Becky Streidl and JoAnn Moody were the three she mentioned most often. Becky was the daughter of Plainwell’s legendary football coach, Jack, and JoAnn was Don Moody’s daughter. Don worked with Ruth and me when Plainwell opened their middle school. I knew a little about all three.
The three girls and David hung out together. David and Ruth dated a bit. What I didn’t know was Ruth wrote about the group in the diaries she kept during her junior and senior years of high school. I discovered them while going through boxes of memorabilia in the summer of 2023. She fantasized about the possibility of marrying David and wondered if children they might have would have red hair like him.
As life turned out, our children had hair like the two of us. Michael’s is more like mine, while I think David and Elizabeth favor Ruth. Mine has changed as Dr. Becker’s did. It’s gray. Ruth’s was always just Ruth’s and never gray.