A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

8: I Marry My Second Husband

While Rose and I were together, sometimes one of us or both of us had a date, and we’d all go out together. And I was friends with an Albuquerque couple in the sheet metal business, Louie and Helen Facaroli—they were Italians—and Louis and Helen sometimes took us out to a place called Silo’s, out there in Tijeras Canyon, the only nightclub in that area at that time. Once or twice a month a bunch of us would go out there to dances. That’s where I learned to dance. It was no problem,though at first I was stepping on everybody’s feet. And we used to go to the Crystal Palace,a bar on Second or Third, near Lead, a nice respectable place. You could go in there in the evenings and sit down at the booths and have a beer.And sometimes this very refined-looking gent would be sitting up at the bar. I wondered why he was always there alone. I was kind of interested, so I asked the Facarolis about him. They knew him quite well. They invited him to our table. That’s how I met Bob Martin. Bob and I started meeting there and having a drink or two. Like me he was a single parent. His wife had died and he had these two little girls. A Spanish girl came in the daytime to take care of them, and he stayed with them at night. Sometimes he sent them down to 8 ❙ I MARRY MY SECOND HUSBAND ❙ 60 ❙ ❙ I MARRY MY SECOND HUSBAND ❙ El Paso to their maternal grandmother,his dead wife Alice’s mother. Grandmother Van Eaton took care of them when Bob couldn’t. Anyhow, Bob Martin decided we ought to get married. He was a good-looking fellow, but I’d learned looks didn’t mean a damn thing. Parker had been good-looking, too. After my experience with the preacher I was totally turned off this marriage business.I told myself and I told Bob Martin I was through with that forever. But Bob kept after me. It’d be good for our kids, he said. Life was easier for a married woman, he said. He said the Lord decreed a woman ought to have a man and vice versa, not go through life alone but two-by-two. Finally I told myself the whole world couldn’t be wrong and me right, so maybe I ought to give this marriage business another try. But if it come to that I had a problem. I hadn’t been giving any thought to it,but I was still a married woman.I’d never got a divorce from Parker, just a legal separation. In ’32 I decided I’d better get a divorce so if I wanted to remarry I would have the privilege of doing so. I looked into the matter and found out Parker was back in the United States. He was up in Colorado, back at his mother’s place in Timnath. So I served him with the papers. All these years he’d been married to me he had an excuse not to have to marry any of the women he ran around with. And being married to him might have been a guard rail that kept me out of trouble. I couldn’t get out and do things I might otherwise have done. Anyway, the last part of ’32 or early ’33, somewhere around there, I got a divorce from Parker. This time he didn’t object. I was finally shut of him. And in ’34 Bob Martin and I got married. Then I had his children,Darlene and Dorothy,to raise Anita with instead of raising her all by herself. So now I’m Frances Martin. We lived in a big house on Silver Street in Old Town. The house had a dumb waiter, and the kids played with it endlessly, sending things up and down. I was still working on the cars. I had a bunch of them in the yard.And though they were young,Darlene and Anita worked in the hot dog and hamburger stand with occasional help 61 ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ from me. We sold hamburgers for fifteen cents, and if sometimes a tourist ordered a steak, why, one of us would run out the back door to the butcher...