In a corner of the basement, among items set aside to be discarded, one cardboard box caught Barbara Knisely Gaeddert’s attention.
A daughter, tasked with auctioning items her parents no longer needed, surveyed her mother’s home in Brookville a final time before tending to her care in a nearby assisted living community.
“I went to the auction and soon realized I did not want to watch, even though I had already sorted out the things I wanted,” Gaeddert said. “After the auction was over, I went in the house for one more look around. I noticed a cardboard box that looked familiar.”
Inside the box were dozens of handwritten letters, poems and postcards exchanged between Gaeddert’s parents while they took classes at Ohio University in the early 1930s.
“So I saved them,” she said. The collection of love letters is now kept in OU’s Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections on the fifth floor of Alden Library.
According to the salvaged letters and the memories of his daughter, Orson Knisely pursued his future bride, Bernice, with fervor from the beginning. He was passionate, if a little clumsy.
The pair played instruments in the university’s orchestra and had their first date immediately following a performance at the insistence of friends.
Orson, who was playing cymbals that night, managed to smash his finger during a prominent cymbal crash immediately followed by a very soft passage in the song, according to family lore.
“During the soft passage, the entire orchestra heard his opinion of the cymbals,” Gaeddert said. “What kind of impression that made on my mother is not recorded, but she must have heard what he said. Nevertheless, the date was clearly a success.”
Many dates between Orson and Bernice were successes, according to their notes describing the couple seeing plays, attending dances on campus and dining at the Berry Hotel, located Uptown where Court Street Diner currently sits.
“I think my dad was smitten most of his life,” Gaeddert said.
In addition to letters, Orson wrote poems for Bernice, including one he penned for her 20th birthday that insists she is "Twenty for a year, but sweet forever.”
Later verses of that same poem, however, foreshadow turbulent months spurred by envy, distance and differences that surfaced during several semesters Orson and Bernice spent apart, working.
“You must remember that in a few short months we experienced all that many do in several years,” Orson wrote to Bernice. “I ask you only to forgive me for being a fool in the past and try to love me in spite of it. Honey, an orchestra is playing 'Here’s Hoping' as I write these words and that is what I shall do — wait and hope.”
Gaeddert said that response is typical of her father, whom she noted was persistent in his love for her conservative mother.
“He just didn’t give up until she said yes,” she said.
The two were married Aug. 24, 1935 in Toledo. Gaeddert, their only surviving child, was born in 1942.
One of Gaeddert’s earliest memories, she recalled, explained her parents’ contrasting personalities.
“My dad had done gymnastics and he was trying to show me a gymnastics trick,” she laughed. “My mother sort of freaked out because she was afraid I would be hurt. She worried about just about everything.”
A free-spirited, devoted father and a selfless, considerate mother offered Gaeddert a blueprint for her own marriage.
She will celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary with husband, Bill, this year.
For Ohio University couples looking to repeat history with a love story like her own, Gaeddert offered a few recommendations: be patient, work hard and laugh a lot.
“Be sure you share the same sense of humor, and enjoy laughing,” she said.
