Wing Love Stories: Sumner & Sylvia

By Sumner Hunnewell

First, it’s important to know that I’m a J. R. R. Tolkien fan and have been since I was a teenager. That is how all of this began. I started the New England Tolkien Society at 16 and engaged in a lot of correspondence around the world. This included a Tolkien fanzine editor, David Merkel, who was going to college in Virginia. We kept up quite a correspondence, even when he went off to the University of Kansas, to get his PhD.

Before the start of my freshman year at the University of Maine in 1980, I had heard that the World Science Fiction Convention was going to be in Boston, two hours from home. I found out that David was going, and we negotiated that I could sleep on the floor of his hotel room for $8 a night. (This was about three hours of take-home pay while working at Aunti Leoni’s Pizza in Portland.) I didn’t drive (I biked everywhere), so a pal took me to Sanford, Maine, on the back of his motorcycle, and a Tolkien friend loaded me in the back of his pickup truck for the drive to Boston. There, I was dropped off in front of the Sheraton.

Mind you, I had no idea what David looked like and there were 3000 SF fans roaming around.

However, we eventually met up. He had brought his newly minted wife, Shiela, and her best friend and fellow artist, Sylvia. When Saturday night rolled around, I was watching TV in David’s room, and Sylvia came in and asked me what I was doing: “There are parties out there!” It might be good to note that at this time, Sylvia was 24 and I a strapping lad of 18. I didn’t drink, and Sylvia discovered what vodka was for the first time that night, so I was her guardian and made sure that she got back safely to the room.

We spent the next day or so together before I headed back to Maine for school. I got her address and a kiss, and I was on my way. I started writing her like any of my other dozens of correspondents. Then I got a Dear John letter from my high school girlfriend. Well, lah-di-dah - wasn’t that nice?

At some point I decided that I was in love with this girl from Kansas City and her exotic Midwestern accent. I typed her a letter in red ink proclaiming the fact. She replied that I had better come visit her during spring break. My work study job didn’t pay any more than Aunti Leoni’s, so the best I could manage was a 40-hour train ride from Boston to Kansas City.

Now, imagine your 18-year-old son is going to do this in the age of cash only, pay phones, and no guarantee that someone would be waiting on the other end. Yes, it had its own particular kind of madness about it.

Well, I arrived with my duffle bag, and she was waiting. I visited her family, and she lied about my age (“He’s 20.”). Within a week I proposed marriage, she said yes, and I was soon back on the train to Maine. That was March of 1981. I moved to Missouri to continue college there. We were married in May 1982, but only after I got my driver’s license at age 20 - “I’m not having my daughter drive off to the honeymoon,” quoth the mother-in-law!

It’s been 42 years now. Who’da thunk it?