This is how it came about. I was writing copy for an advertising agency in Chicago when I was offered a job as rewrite man on a magazine in San Francisco. When I got to San Francisco the first staff member my new boss introduced me to was Elisabeth. As the boss and I entered the room, she was sitting at a desk with a window at her back. She was wearing a dark red blouse. Something went tick somewhere inside of me, and I knew that something had happened.
That first day Elisabeth and I discovered we had a mutual enthusiasm—mountain-climbing. The next Sunday we went down the coast a way and climbed some sea-cliffs. On later Sundays we climbed various cliffs at Mount Diablo. About fifteen months after we met I proposed. Elisabeth says the fifteen months it took me to come 'round was in perfect keeping with the length of time it takes me to get bathed, shaved, and dressed in the morning.
Elisabeth: Before I met Jim I had graduated from Stanford; had gone back and gotten a Master's degree; and, with another Stanford girl, had gone abroad and bicycled about two thousand miles in England, Germany, and Austria. When I came home to San Francisco I got the magazine job in which Jim found me.
Jim belonged to the National Parachute Jumpers Association, and I belonged to the Soaring Society of America. After we got engaged I made him promise never to jump again, and he made me promise to stay out of gliders. We were married in the old brown shingle-sided house in which I was born. For our wedding day we picked Friday the 13th.
Jim and Elisabeth: We spent our honeymoon in a spot we shall always keep secret, and then made our home in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. Our front window looked out upon a beautiful view of the Bay and of Angel Island. Week days we commuted by ferry and worked at our jobs on the magazine [Sunset], and Sundays we paddled on the Bay in our faltboot, or German folding kayak.
Young J. P., Larsh E., Bicycle built for two, Portland, Binfords and Mort, 1940.