We arrived in Oakdale the week before school was to begin. At church on Sabbath we met several friendly girls and one of them, Phyllis Maxwell, invited Jeanine and me home for lunch. After lunch she was telling us about the school we would be attending, Modesto Union Academy, as she was showing us the school yearbook.
“Carolyn, there is your third-grade boyfriend, Dale Ratzlaff,” Jeanine exclaimed as we were looking at the pictures of the students. I was embarrassed to the point of anger. I was now a freshman in high school. I didn’t want to be reminded of a third-grade boyfriend. I insisted it wasn’t him, but I knew it was and felt myself blushing. He was even more attractive and handsome than I had remembered him from the many years before. Seeing his many pictures in the yearbook I could tell he had grown very tall, appeared to be very popular, and was involved in many of the school activities, including drawing the cartoons for the yearbook.
Monday morning Jeanine and I were about the third group of students to get on the bus. A few stops later Dale and a couple of other students got on. Jeanine poked me and said, “Carolyn, that is Dale Ratzlaff; you should talk to him.” I wasn’t about to do such a bold thing! But I knew it was Dale.
The next day one of Dale’s friends asked me if I used to live in Phoenix. I answered, “Yes.” That apparently was all the information he wanted. A couple of days later Dale asked if he could sit with me on the bus on the way home; I agreed.
In our visiting I learned that his family had moved to North Carolina from Phoenix where his mother was going to teach school in a one-room school house. The Ratzlaffs had moved to get their children out of the city into the country. Just a few weeks after arriving there his father died from pancreatic cancer. His mother stayed a year, and then she moved the family to Fortuna, California, where she again taught school. By the time Dale was ready for high school they had moved to Escalon, California, so Dale could attend the Seventh-day Adventist high school in Modesto.
Dale asked if he could sit with me again the next morning and again I agreed, and then again for the afternoon ride home. After this there was no longer a need to ask; we both wanted to sit together and visit about the day’s activities. This became a very joyous one and a half hour ride to and from school each day. One warm, spring day, April 17, 1953, Dale asked me to go steady. 1 agreed, and we continued enjoying school functions together.
Sylvia Guynes, Ronnie Marxmiller, Carolyn,
and Dale eating ice cream bars.
That year my family attended an evangelistic series of meetings given by Elder Folkenberg in the town of Riverbank, a small town between where Dale and I lived, and Dale attended these meetings as well. The aroma of the sawdust floor in the large tent and the thrill of being able to sit next to Dale are still vivid in my memory. When a call was made for people to commit their lives to Christ Dale and I responded by going forward. It wasn’t the first time we had responded to such calls. It seemed that whenever a call was made we felt the need to recommit. We both wanted God in our lives, and we often would pray for each other, asking God to help our relationship be pleasing to Him.
Dale and I were both reading Messages to Young People, a book written by the lady I learned about in the third grade, Ellen G. White. We believed this book had a special message from God for the youth of our day. We wanted to follow every counsel we read. I was so earnest, in fact, that I would not allow my picture to be taken for the school annual my sophomore year. This decision was based on information I had read in Messages to Young People, pages 316, 317.
As I visit the homes of our people and our schools, I see that all the available space on tables.. .is filled up with photographs… I have been instructed that these pictures are as so many idols…It is His [Christ’s] likeness that is to be kept before the mind.
Our school went on a weekend trip to Wawona Camp in Yosemite in the spring of my freshman year. Jeanine and I were excited at being able to go, and Dale was going too. Dale and I rode up in a car with Jeanine and her boyfriend. Saturday night we went to the valley floor and watched the fire fall from the top of Glacier Point.
Dale and Carolyn at Wawona Camp in Yosemite.
On the way back to Wawona, as we were sitting close beside each other in the back seat, Dale leaned over and kissed me. What excitement! What a thrill! It was electrifying!
At the end of the year Dale told me he was moving away. His mother wanted to be close to Pacific Union College where his sister Opal could go to college. His mother was not feeling well and Dale was going to stay out of school for a year to support her. Once again my heart became sad as I heard this news. Dale promised he would write to me, and I promised to do the same.
My sophomore year was a lonesome one and every day when I arrived home from school I would check to see if there were a letter from Dale. Many days my heart’s desire was met with one of his letters that 1 would eagerly open. Those letters kept coming to me all year and mine were going to him.
That summer there was an Adventist youth congress for North and South American young people held at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. We had agreed to meet, somehow, and spend the day together. I rode up with Jeanine and her boyfriend, wondering how I would be able to find Dale. When we arrived in San Francisco, and as we waited at a traffic signal, I looked over at the car in the lane next to us and saw Dale and his mother. Quickly, before the light changed to green, I got out and jumped into his car!
Dale and I spent the day together with his mother. That evening when a call came for young people to commit their lives to God’s work, Dale and I eagerly responded. This was our common goal being involved in God’s kingdom work. Dale wanted to be a missionary doctor; I wanted to be a missionary nurse.
Just before my junior year of high school, my parents told me they were moving back to Arizona. Oh, how I did not want to go and leave the opportunity to be where I could see Dale at least once in a while. I begged my parents to let me go to Monterey Bay Academy in Watsonville, California, and they consented. Now I had the job of persuading Dale to go to MBA. Would he agree to go? Could he afford it financially?
My Cup Overflows. Copyright © 2009 by Carolyn Ratzlaff. All Scripture quotations—except where otherwise noted—are from The New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1979, 1994 by the Lockman Foundation, used by permission. All rights reserved. Life Assurance Ministries, Inc.
Carolyn has always been a positive person enjoying life and outdoor activities such as hiking and gardening, and she and her husband currently raise a good portion of their own food in small grow boxes. She also reads many health journals and is often surprised at the contrast between what was taught through the writings of Ellen White on forbidden items of diet and health, and the beneficial evidence of these same items which is supported by a plethora of scientific studies.
She and her husband Dale Ratzlaff have two married sons and four grandchildren.
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