Oh the excitement! The exhilaration! The emotion! The love! The commitment! I was hearing the music to “Here Comes the Bride”. It was June 10, 1957- our wedding day! These were feelings of emotional joy-too deep for words to express. We had kept our commitment of purity, and now this was our wedding night our dream come true!
Our wedding was beautiful and memorable, as I’m sure most brides feel about their wedding. All four of my sisters and my roommate Edith Forgey were in our wedding. Jeanine, Edie, and Edith were bridesmaids. Millie was a junior bridesmaid and Marie was our flower girl. Lyle Pollett, Dale’s MBA and college roommate was the best man . Ralph Allen was an usher along with Bob Poynor. Larry Mundall, my cousin, was a junior usher and his younger brother Merritt was the Bible boy. Our cup of joy was being filled and beginning to over flow. However, what was that we smelled?
Lyle was the only one who knew where Dale had parked our car. After the reception he was going to take us from the church to Napa and to our car. We would change clothes at Dale’s mother’s house and then spend the first night in the little apartment we had rented. No one knew where this was. The next day we would travel to Lake Tahoe for our honey moon.
I was nineteen and Dale was twenty when we were married, and all of our friends were about the same age and still playing pranks. Dale heard of a plot to kidnap one of us and keep us separated for- who knows how long?
Dale’s great uncle who married us had a house very close to the church with a circle drive. Bob Poynor would take us to the house as if we were going to change clothes there. We would go in the front door and then quickly out the back door. We would then walk down a little hill to where Lyle would be waiting in his car on an unknown, and seldom used, driveway behind the house. This way the guys would not know where we were and could not capture one of us.
As we drove to Dale’s uncle’s house, the guys were following in their cars behind. We quickly jumped from Bob’s car, ran into the house, and then down to where Lyle was waiting for us. Bob waited in his car a very long time in front of the house, acting as though he expected us to appear any minute. Final ly, we were told later, the guys came and asked, “Where are Dale and Carolyn?” Bob’s reply was, “They went into the house and I am waiting for them to come out.” Well, we never came out, and by the time the guys figured this out we were well on our way to Napa.
Lyle was not entirely innocent, though. When we had our clothes changed he took us to our car and left quickly. We then noticed a strange, putrid odor. Lyle had rubbed the manifold, the door handles, the hood latch , and the trunk lid with Limburger cheese! We drove to a service station and asked the attendant if he would wash these places for us. He just laughed and said “No way, Jose!”
Ralph and Alma, together with Alma’s parents, had offered their cabin at Lake Tahoe to us for our honeymoon. Since money was scarce we gladly accepted their gracious offer. However, this was a joke on us, because they did not tell us that the cabin was unfinished, and had no hot water or a bathroom. There was running water at the kitchen sink and a faucet on the outside wall of the kitchen, and there was an outhouse! We used the outside faucet for showers and stood on a snow bank as we showered in cold water!
On our way home we stopped to thank the Thieles for the use of their cabin. Ralph and Alma were there, too, but we never said a word, at least not at that time, about not having hot water or a bathroom! Today, we miss Ralph and Alma; they are both with the Lord.
We spent our first Sabbath in the woods reading from Adventist Home, another book by Ellen White, whom Dale and I revered. We each grew up in a family where it was a daily practice to have morning and evening worship. Each of us had appreciated this time in our respective families, and we had agreed to establish this practice in our new home.
Since Dale had given me the Testimonies for the Church for graduation, we decided now was the time to read them together. I had read some during my last summer at home with my parents, but I would usually fall asleep before I read too many pages. Dale would come home very tired from a hard day of hauling hay, but before we went to bed we would read a few pages from those books. One evening we read that the time had not yet come to give up pork. We were shocked, even though the dates indicated this was in the early years of Adventism. We had both grown up in strict vegetarian homes, and we knew that this was because of the teaching of Ellen White. Since we had not really enjoyed these negative reprimands to people we did not know anyway, we decided we would no longer use these books for devotional reading.
Dale was working for his cousin hauling hay, and I was a happy homemaker our first three months of marriage. Dale had not earned as much during the summer as we had anticipated, and it looked like PUC would not be an option, so he registered to attend Napa Community College. When my parents learned of this, Dad said, “No way, you can’t go to a community college. We will send you money for the first quarter’s tuition.” They apparently had more money now than when I wanted to attend college.
Dale was immediately accepted at PUC and began another year of pre-med classes. We moved to PUC into a tiny house that had a rotten bathroom floor that fell through during the year we were there. The property owner eventually fixed it, however, after many weeks of our asking.
One night Dale was away. I had locked the doors, turned out the lights, and was opening the window before climbing into bed. These windows were the type that the top frame opens by coming down and the bottom frame opens by going up. At night we liked to open the top window. As I was opening this window, the supporting cord broke and the window fell, trapping both of my hands between the two windows. I could not pull them out nor could I feel any pain as they were too tightly trapped. I began screaming for help. I yelled and yelled, but there was no answer from any of our close neighbors. “God, help me,” I cried. I screamed again, “Help Me! Someone come help me!” Still there was no response. I had visions of losing the fingers on both of my hands. There would be no more piano or marimba playing, no more typing, no more crochet ing, knitting, or sewing. I was beginning to panic. “Please, God, send someone to help,” I prayed. I screamed again as loud as I could. “Help me! Someone came to help me!”
This time our property owner whose house was just a few yards from ours, heard me and came out of her house. When I explained my plight, she ran back to her house and came with another key to our back door. Once she was in the house, she came and released me. My fingers were flat and had no feeling-as if they were asleep. I put them into ice water, and slowly they began to fill out again and the feeling returned. After about twenty minutes they seemed to be OK. I did not have any pain that night or later. I do believe God was graciously watching over my hands at this time, and I thanked Him.
One of the classes Dale was taking made him very disillusioned with college, especially when the teacher said, “Dale, you have been reading Ellen White too much.” How could a teacher in a Seventh-day Adventist college say something like this? We believed Ellen White to be a prophet of God, and therefore believed that whatever she said must be taken on the same level as Scripture. Ellen White condemned the reading of certain literature, which this class was studying, and Dale began to think college was not for him. I had been working as secretary for the men’s dean, earning less than a dollar an hour. Finances were slim, and we already had the debt of one quarter’s tuition.
About this same time a friend, Bill Ruzicka from Napa, began talking to Dale about going into the trucking business with him. They would buy and sell hay and haul it from the Sacramento area to the Petaluma area dairy farmers. As they penciled everything out on paper, it looked like this could be a prosperous business venture. They weren’t long in borrowing the money to make the down payment on a large hay truck, and this temporarily ended Dale’s college career. Things now were going well, we thought. We purchased our first home in Napa, and so did his partner Bill and his wife Pat.
The rosy picture of prosperity did not last as long as we had expected. What had looked so good on paper did not materialize. There were huge truck repairs, three serious truck accidents, none when Dale was driving, and barely enough income for two families. We weren’t sure how much longer we could stay in this business.
Dad, Millie, Edie, Carolyn, Dale, Jeanine, and Bob.
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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