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F
or a marriage that lasted as long as Johnny’s and mine did, and had as much mutual respect and love as it did, I will say this: we sure weren’t that generous to each other right out of the gate!

The first I knew of the Griffin family was Johnny’s older sister Mary, who I thought was the prettiest girl in Presentation parish. Johnny’s other sister, Peg, was cute, too—and perky and funny; she went on to raise five wonderful sons. But Mary was maybe the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She had big blue eyes and softly wavy hair and a beautiful smile. She was a terrific dresser, too, and could wear hats, scarves, and jewelry with real style. We all adored her fashion sense. I didn’t know her well or anything, but I sure knew her looks. One day my sister Irene and I were outside our church when she alerted me to a young man coming out of the doors. “Oh Mag, see that guy?” she said. “That’s Johnny Griffin, that beautiful Mary Griffin’s brother!”

Naturally I wanted to see what he looked like. But what I saw was somebody short, with dark hair, and cute, but not drop-dead handsome like Robert Taylor, as I was kind of expecting from somebody related to the gorgeous Mary.

“Gee, you’d never know it,” I said. “The difference is amazing.”

Isn’t that terrible to say?

Well, when I finally met Johnny, it’s not as if he said anything all that sweet, either. I was working at the Form Fit Bra Factory in the returns department, my second job after graduating from high school, and it was a great experience. I worked in the back of the building, where we were left alone. It was just a boss, me, and a girl named Helen who did the repairs on the bras. Johnny, it turned out, worked in a separate department boxing up items for shipping, and one day he was visiting with Helen.

“Oh Johnny,” she said, “this is Margie Corbally, but you probably know that because she’s in your parish.”

I expected to get an “Oh sure, I’ve seen her around.” Instead, he looked at me and said, “No, I’ve never seen her before.”

Well, well, well! Suffice it to say, I was mighty offended by that, because while I was no Mary Griffin, I thought I was still pretty hot stuff. I’d certainly had enough of the guys from other departments come down to check me out when I first started working at Form Fit. But still, we were in the same parish! (Although he did live on the other side of Crawford Avenue, and in those days, a big street like that often kept neighborhoods from crossing over and getting to know other neighborhoods.)

Anyway, after that introduction, I thought, “God, he must really think he’s something.”

Young people are so nuts!

Later in our lives, I liked to tease my husband. “Johnny, you got off on the wrong foot with me!”

“I didn’t see you!” he insisted.

“Oh I know you,” I’d reply. “You wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of saying you saw me.” Then we’d laugh about it.

But I needed convincing after that first encounter. Johnny’s friend Catherine Jameson was his big supporter to me. “Oh Margie, he’s a doll!” she kept saying. “So funny and so nice.”

Well, I certainly wasn’t agreeing with that. But what do you know, he was on the El with me every day going to work, and before long we got to talking a lot. He’d ask if he could walk me home from the El, which was only a few blocks. And, of course, it didn’t take me long to realize he was the funniest guy I’d been around in my life.

Johnny could see the humor in everything. Now, he didn’t tell jokes, and it wasn’t lampshade-on-your-head behavior. But he had a keen grasp of what was funny in every little thing around him. His observations were priceless. You know how Kathy’s humor is really all about what she notices in people? That was her father. He could make me laugh like nobody else.

He got along great with Irene and Rae when he met them through me, and one night he told us he could get his mother’s car and, if we liked, he could drive us all to the show on Saturday night and for a bite to eat afterward. We said “Fine,” and that was the start of the four of us hanging out and having a great time. We did that for quite a while, and it was really fun. One New Year’s Eve, Johnny got the car to take us to a big party at a tavern. We had a wonderful time, but the car wouldn’t start when we tried to leave. That meant walking home, and out of vanity I had chosen to wear high heels over what the cold weather dictated, which were galoshes. Well, Johnny knew how to wring fun out of even a bitterly cold, windy trudge home. We’d run into apartment buildings occasionally for warmth, and while the girls and I were dancing around to get the chills out, Johnny would ring about six buzzers on the box in the foyer. You’d hear people grumbling, “Who the hell’s down there! What are you doing?” We’d be ready to kill Johnny as we chased him outside, but we were laughing really hard, too.

Of course, I was starting to really like him. But I didn’t know exactly how he felt about me, because he seemed to enjoy being with all of us. Well, one night we were waiting for Irene and Rae because we were all supposed to go see a movie, and the word came that they’d been hung up someplace. I suggested sitting and waiting for them, but it would have meant missing the film.

“No, Mag,” Johnny said. “Why don’t just you and I go?”

I was so surprised. “Gee,” I stammered out. “I . . . I don’t know.”

But I said yes. And it wasn’t so hard to say, either. Johnny would later tell me, “Mag, I had been waiting for MONTHS for that to happen! I knew how you were with the girls, and I was afraid to call my hand too soon.” How sweet!

That was when we started going out on dates by ourselves, and Johnny and I became a real couple. But I didn’t have to feel bad for Irene and Rae. As luck would have it, Johnny had a buddy named Jim who fell for Rae, and around the same time, my sister Anne introduced Irene to an aspiring fireman named Joe who fell for her! Pairing off with Johnny might have even sparked these connections, too, because these guys suddenly felt they could ask the other girls out. We all fell in love with our eventual husbands at the same time, I tell you. It was strange, amazing, and perfect.

When war talk started building in 1940 because of what was going on in Europe and the Pacific, Johnny, who was twenty-four, did what a lot of young men did then: he enlisted. The feeling was, join up before you had to join, and you might be out in a year. Plus, you’d get your job back, with seniority. (By that time, Johnny was working for a shipping company.) We’d talked about getting married, and we decided to wait until he got out of the army.

It was the beginning of December 1941 when Johnny got a furlough from the military, and I couldn’t have been more excited. Spokane, Washington, where Johnny was stationed at Felts Field, had seemed so far away, and now I was going to have him home for three weeks!

It turned out to be only three days. It was a Sunday, and we were all getting ready for a big dinner that night at my sister Anne’s, when they announced on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. None of us even knew where Pearl Harbor was. But we knew what it meant. Johnny had to go back. I was devastated. We saw each other at my sister’s that night, anyway, but the mood was more anxious than celebratory.

It wouldn’t be for another day or so that he could get back, anyway, because he had to get everything in order per the army’s wishes. Plus, transportation options were few. But boy, it was thrilling to see how quickly this country acted. Everything became for the soldiers, especially the trains. If you were going somewhere, too bad. You had to wait until a seat opened up that wasn’t needed for a man in uniform. Also, they started rationing food right away. You couldn’t just buy sugar or butter or meat whenever you wanted. The way this country came together was wonderful.

But my Johnny was going to be gone now for a lot longer than we’d hoped. On top of his training to be an aerial photographer, he’d now get combat training, too. How did I know he wouldn’t be shipped overseas immediately?

Johnny wrote me a letter when he returned to Spokane, saying he thought it was time for us to get married. As you might imagine, I was all for it. My dad wasn’t so hot about the idea, though. He was always helping his grown kids if they had money problems, or if a grandchild didn’t have one of his parents around because of divorce or death, so he imagined a future scenario in which he was once again helping out one of his children, in this case a widowed daughter with a young child—a sad scenario, sure, but a realistic one—and he just didn’t see the necessity in us rushing into marriage. I could see his point. Most girls waited out the war to get married, but Johnny and I didn’t want to wait.

But there was also something very attractive about making a clean break from our families. If we were in Spokane, we could start our lives without anybody telling us what we were doing wrong. As much as I grew to love Johnny’s mother, for instance, she was a forceful presence who was used to raising her kids and telling them what to do, and she could sometimes be pretty hard to take. By ourselves, I’d be able to make a crummy meal for Johnny and nobody had to know but him.

So I went straight to Spokane, where Johnny had an apartment ready to go, and on the morning of March 20, 1942, we got married, with only an army buddy of Johnny’s and his girlfriend to stand up for us. Nobody could make it out from Chicago, because it was wartime, and traveling like that just wasn’t easy. But I got two telegrams from my family, which was so thrilling, plus cards and money from both our families. Even Dad, who was so against it, sent us money, with a note: “Use it wisely.” So we threw ourselves a nice breakfast afterward at the Desert Hotel to celebrate.

I was happy as a lark. I wore a simple but nice suit that was a real soft yellow with a corsage of purple violets and a hat and veil that were black. Johnny was in his army uniform. Johnny could be romantic when he wanted to be, but my favorite photo from that day is of him right before he has to sign the church’s marriage registry. He’s got this “Boy, what did I do?” look on his face, like he didn’t know whether he wanted to sign or not, and I’m laughing like hell. It’s so cute. The guys there were so funny about it, too. They kept saying, “John, we’re waiting in line if you don’t want her!”

Immediately we knew that getting married was the right thing to do. Our one-bedroom apartment in Spokane was cozy enough, and I made good friends right away in that building, one of them a pregnant girl whose husband was overseas. With so many people around me in the same boat, I never got afraid or anything, even the times Johnny might be at the base all night on duty. And while I always missed my family, I knew we were getting the best start for our marriage away from any potential criticism. And I didn’t know how to do anything, really. The first time I washed a floor, I used so many soap suds that it seemed like I was rinsing and re-rinsing that surface for days!

Our wedding day: Johnny being funny, me laughing. I love it.

Then our first child, Kenny, was born, nine months and five days after our wedding, which certainly pleased my father, I’ll have you know. But it wasn’t long after that that I took Kenny back to Chicago, because Johnny was being sent to Laredo, Texas, for more training, and he didn’t think I’d want to follow him. “It’s scroungy and beastly hot,” Johnny said. “I wouldn’t ask you to come here, Mag.” I didn’t notice any of the other wives going there, either. So I moved into an apartment close to my dad’s store, with my sister Irene as a roommate.

Then Johnny was sent to Denver, and his commanding officer said it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the men’s wives to join them. I had to agree. Kenny was thirteen months old at the time, and I ended up loving Denver. Between Spokane and Denver—two gorgeous cities—I felt like I was luckier than a lot of other army wives. Rae’s husband, Jim, for instance, was sent to Tullahoma, Tennessee. Let’s just say Rae wasn’t too keen on the place.

When Johnny’s stint in the army was up, and we were finally able to settle down in Chicago, I realized that Johnny had never lived in a house—he’d grown up in apartments—and I, meanwhile, had lived only in houses until our early married days. I said, “Johnny, I want a house.” He said, “Fine.” We moved into a house one of my brothers had lived in, which was only a block away from my parents. We never suffered for babysitters, because Kenny was their first grandchild in a while, since their other grandkids had grown by that time.

When it came to child rearing, Johnny took to it like a pro. He never complained about changing diapers, or giving a bath, or doing laundry. He was really good about that. There was no henpecking going on, either! I just want to make that clear, in case anybody’s thinking he was unhappy with sharing these chores. I simply got a great guy for a husband.

You want to know how great Johnny was? Because we were living paycheck to paycheck after the war ended—Johnny having gotten his solid but not-so-high-paying job back at Railway Express—we could only afford a house that needed a lot of work. (Really, every house we ever bought was like that!) At the time we moved into our first home, Johnny didn’t know a whole lot about plumbing, carpentry, and so on. The most he ever did growing up, living in an apartment, was paint walls. But the guys he worked with knew all that stuff, and they were only too happy to show him. And Johnny took to it all beautifully. He loved learning how to build a fence, tile a floor, make dormers. The thing about Johnny was, whatever he concentrated on, he did right. That endeared him to Dad. “Such a fine young man!” he’d say about Johnny.