Journey into Darkness by John Douglas & Mark Olshaker

Author:John Douglas & Mark Olshaker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 1997-01-22T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

SUE BLUE

As soon as he saw her for the first time, John Albert Collins knew that Gertrude Martinus was the girl for him. It was May of 1956 at the White Cannon Inn in East Rockaway, Long Island. Gertrude, or Trudy as she was called, was there for a Young Republican Club dance. Jack Collins and his buddy Ron White were sitting in the cocktail lounge, celebrating having recently gotten out of the Navy. They were savoring a pair of frosty Heinekens when Trudy passed through on her way to the ladies’ room. Jack’s friend recognized her and called out to say hello. Then he introduced her to Jack.

“Right then and there, as our eyes met,” Jack said, “I saw straight into her soul, and I was utterly and profoundly in love.”

Trudy wasn’t so sure, at least not so quickly. She was with a date that evening who would not be at all appreciative of this other man’s attention.

But Jack persisted. He got her phone number from Ron. He called a week later and asked her out. She agreed. During this first date, he asked her to marry him.

Her parents were understandably wary about this fastlane approach from a young man whose current summertime employment was as a general laborer, occasionally working the garbage detail, for the Department of Public Works in the town of Lynbrook, Long Island. Never mind that he was awaiting autumn entry into Columbia University’s Graduate School of English literature.

Still, Thomas Martinus, a bank examiner a whole lot of room to talk. He had asked Mamie Johanna Hotze to marry him on the third day after they’d met. So by that standard, Jack Collins was something of a slowpoke. When Trudy’s dad died in June of 1994, he and Mamie had been married for sixty-eight years.

For whatever combination of reasons, personal confidence or divine plan, Jack and Trudy Collins each knew what they wanted. They were engaged that August and married in December of 1956. Ironically, Trudy’s parents had constantly warned her as a child: “Always do your very best, or you’ll end up marrying a garbage man.”

After a semester at Columbia, Jack decided a Ph.D. in English might not be the fastest route to providing the kind of life he wanted Trudy to enjoy. She had a very good job as a legal secretary for Caltex—the California-Texas Oil Company—and it was an insult to his sense of 1950s manhood to think of a woman having to support him. So he quit grad school and got a job in the purchasing department of M.W. Kellogg, a major international engineering and construction company. After a year, he had been promoted to buyer and had enrolled in night law school at NYU.

As he got to know his son-in-law, Tom Martinus’s continuing concern was that since Jack was Catholic, he’d keep Trudy pregnant all the time, spending her life tending an army of kids. Yet after seven years of marriage, Jack and Trudy were still childless. By this

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