It’s Time for SNGF

This past week has just flown by and it’s again time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver’s weekly challenge – if we choose to accept it!

This week’s question is “How did your parents meet?” I have to admit that when I was growing up, I don’t ever remember my parents telling me how they met – or if they did, the story didn’t stay in my mind. When I began researching the family tree in earnest in 1981, I was much more interested in finding out about those long gone and never asked either parent at that time either. So, the short answer is that I don’t know how the met and both are long gone.

I do remember helping Nana clean down in the basement one day – I was perhaps ten years old – and I found an old newspaper clipping that was an engagement announcement, except it was not for my mother and father. It announced that my father was engaged to someone I’d never heard of. Nana said that Dad was engaged to a nice girl when he met my mother and they broke up.

Maybe that’s why the subject was never discussed at home.

My dad, George Michael Sabo, was born in Passaic, New Jersey on 9 February 1926 and lived there until we moved to Wayne in 1963. He graduated from Passaic High School and attended some type of short business school, but didn’t graduate from college.

My mother, Doris Priscilla Adams, was born in Calais, Maine on 7 June 1923. She was three years older than my father, which I suspect might have also been a bit of an issue for Nana. Mom moved up and down the East Coast as my grandfather was transferred to various job posts for the Western Union. Mom lived in Ridgewood, New Jersey as a teenager and graduated from Ridgewood High School.

Ridgewood wasn’t too far from Passaic, but it wasn’t next door either. Mom also served in the WAVES during World War II and was stationed in San Diego until the end of the war. She lived with my grandparents, who hadn’t yet moved to Massachusetts.

I imagine that my parents met at a social gathering of some kind – at a restaurant, a bar or a dance. Neither of my parents were religious, but Mom was raised as a Protestant and Dad as a Catholic, so they definitely didn’t meet at a church event. It’s possible that they had a common friend who introduced them.

George and Doris married on 6 June 1947 in Hackensack, Bergen, New Jersey.

I think that my parents decided to have a low key wedding, as my very religious Nana wouldn’t have been very happy about a civil wedding instead of one at St. Michael’s Church!

They had a short honeymoon in Montreal, Canada:

George and Doris in Montreal, Canada

Upon returning to New Jersey, they settled into married life back in Passaic, in the house where my dad was born and where he had grown up.

Dad, Mom and Me, c1956
49 Summer Street, Passaic, New Jersey

So, as Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that!”