No photos from your honeymoon? Seems like you’d have at
least a few photos from the experience, right?
But when Bob Walsman got to thinking why he and his wife
didn’t have any photos from their honeymoon, his wife stepped in with an
explanation.
“She said, ‘We didn’t own a camera.’ We didn’t have enough
money to buy a camera, for crying out loud.”
He can laugh about it now, all these years later. Bob and
Mary Anne commemorated their 50th anniversary last weekend at French
Lick Resort, coming full circle to where it all started when they honeymooned
as a young couple who had little more than each other.
She was in her first year out of school with a teaching job,
and he had one more year left in pharmacy school. With little in the bank and
only having three or four days they could be away, the options were limited.
Bob’s father suggested some place called French Lick.
Never heard of it
before. What’s there? Bob asked.
Quite a bit more than they expected, it turned out.
And it started from the moment they pulled up to the front
steps of the French Lick Sheraton (which is now French Lick Springs Hotel. Two
bellmen opened the trunk to retrieve their bags. Mary Anne insisted on hauling
all the luggage up the steps herself, even when the bellmen tried to take the
bags from her. I’ll get that for you,
ma’am. Bob laughs at the sight of his petite newlywed — all 5-foot-1 of her
— lugging an army of bags all by herself.
Remember, cash was tight.
“If he takes our bags we’re going to have to tip him, and we
don’t have any extra money for tips,” Bob recalls of his wife’s reasoning for
the heavy lifting.
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| Bob and Mary Anne from their wedding day on June 14, 1969. |
More relaxing memories stand out, too.
They rode a bicycle built for two. Went riding at the horse
stables. Took a few trips across the road to the putt-putt course that used to
be next to the Pluto Water production plant, so close that “while you were
playing putt-putt, you could definitely smell the Pluto Water,” Bob remembers.
“And we spent a lot of time on the porch in the rocking
chairs at French Lick, I remember that,” Mary Anne says.
“Eating ice cream, if I remember right,” Bob adds about
those timeless pleasures that people are still enjoying today.
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| French Lick Springs Hotel in the 1960s. |
“You wore a suit and tie every meal,” Mary Anne reminds Bob,
before he finishes the thought:
“For two little kids fresh out of college from Batesville,
Indiana, it was really a cultural jolt, that’s for sure.”
Four courses for breakfast. Five courses for dinner. Eggs
Benedict for the first time. “They had things on the menu I couldn’t
pronounce,” Bob recalls, chuckling.
“I just remember when we would go to breakfast and dinner,
the formality of it. We were always just impressed by the food, the service,”
Mary Anne continues. “The waiters had a napkin over their arm…”
“And pulled the chair out for you,” Bob continues. “Every
detail was so formal back then.”
The honeymoon experience kept them coming back once every
year or two, all the way up until it was time to think about a 50th
anniversary celebration. One of their kids had glitzy destinations suggested.
Vegas. Atlantis. Something big and distant.
Bob and Mary Anne were thinking more nostalgic and modest,
just like how it all started.
“We said, ‘You know what, we’d like to go back to where we
spent our honeymoon, and they were all for it,” Bob says of his crew of 11
family members that joined them here for their 50th. “We just
thought it would be neat to bring everyone. The kids have heard the stories,
but now the grandkids are old enough, so we’ll kind of pass the history and the
tradition of coming down here.
“We still keep coming back,” he says, smiling, “and probably
come back until we celebrate our 100th.”