Judie Wolkoff
Carole was my special very best friend from the day we met in junior high school nearly seventy years ago. Each of us thought the other was hysterically funny. Carole could set me off just by crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue.
One particularly annoyed teacher, Henry R____, warned the school faculty not to allow us into the same class together, but not before kicking us out of his biology class on the last day of the semester. He told the principal we disrupted his class by constantly giggling. Outraged, we marched into the Dean of Girls office and complained he did it because he was mad at us for refusing to dissect frogs, which was true. But, of course, not the whole truth.
I adored Carole’s family. One day, Frances, Carole’s mom, showed me the photo album she’d made of Carole and her cousins when they lived in Boston. I hadn’t known till then that Carole was a talented ice skater and had won second place in a Boston citywide skating competition when she was in grade school. Carole should have won first place, Frances said, but that prize went to the mayor’s daughter. Always modest, Carole considered her mom’s bias a wild over-statement, but I didn’t. Carole was not only an exceptionally graceful and beautiful dancer, but talented in every sport she attempted.
Our high school days were happy ones, but by the time we were in college we were anxious to forget studies and start traveling which we did by taking a bus from Idaho Falls to Mexico City where we spent a semester at what was then known as MCC. Mexico City College. While there we skipped a couple of weeks of classes and were chosen to play very tiny parts in a movie being filmed just outside the city, “The Sun Also Rises” starring Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Mel Ferrer and Eddie Albert. We were nineteen so we considered all these actors antique thespians. However, we agreed that Tyrone Power was “pretty nice for such an old guy". (He was 42) Our next attempt to travel was a year later when we were hired as stewardesses by United Airlines. It began with “stew school” in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place we both hated, but not as much as the actual work we had to do on an airplane. Two months into the job we quit and headed up to Seattle where we worked for Boeing in their steno pool. Why Seattle? Because Carole had met and fallen in love with Alan who happened to live there. On their January 1960 wedding day in Idaho Falls, Carole was about to take her Uncle Scotty’s arm to walk down the aisle when she suddenly remembered she didn’t have anything “borrowed”. I quickly slipped off my ring and she slipped
it onto her left hand ring finger. When the priest nodded to Alan that it was time to place the wedding band on Carole’s finger, Alan looked so surprised to see that Carole was already wearing two rings—her engagement ring and my borrowed ring—that we began giggling. Then Alan joined us. The three of us shook with quiet laughter during most of the ceremony and my mother told me afterward that everybody thought the three of us were crying.
Although Carole and Alan moved to Hawaii and I lived in NYC after I was married, Carole and I shared our golden days of raising our beloved children and often thought that maybe, some day, one of my girls and one of her boys would get married so we’d be officially related. Since that never happened, once we were grandmothers we started plotting again. Who knows????
How I will miss my dearest lifelong friend! I have been so lucky to have her in my life. In the millions of centuries that have passed since our planet was created, I am awed by the fact that Carole and I not only arrived here in the same century, but in the same year, on the same continent and ended up living in the same small town in Idaho. My grief at her passing would be almost unendurable if I didn’t have a lifetime of memories. Her laugh. Her warmth. Her humor. Her loyal friendship. I can conjure them all in a second