Handed down by:Kathy F. Harvey

Courtship Memories of Morton Andrew Foster
Interview by Kathy Foster Harvey
November 30, 2009

Where love blooms and blossoms isn’t always something that is predictable, but geography seems to play an important part in placing two people in an orbit that lets paths cross and fates change from separate orbits that become a paired orbit. Such is the case of Morton Andrew Foster and Afton Bennett.

Afton moved to Oakland, California leaving her hometown of Ogden, Utah to join her brothers, Albert Osborne Bennett and his wife Dorothy and Earl Edward Bennett and his wife Faye. Al owned the business, a Greyhound Bus Depot in downtown Oakland: Earl managed it. Afton came to search out new horizons and help out at the bus depot. She lived with Earl and Faye in their upstairs apartment in Oakland.

Morton born and raised in Spreckles, California, was finishing out his Navy obligations in the Bay Area. Discharged in December of 1945, Mort met his buddies, Frank Cambra, Joe Laherran, and Jack Cronin for breakfast. The four friends decided to go over to the Naval Supply Depot in Oakland – Building 310 - and apply for jobs. Since they were all veterans, they qualified with a 10 point preference and were hired immediately. They found an apartment with kitchen privileges in Mrs. Agers’s house at $7.00 per month each and moved in.

Each weekend on leave he would travel south to visit his sisters in Salinas and Spreckles. His mode of transportation was the bus.

There in the Oakland Greyhound Bus Depot is where separate orbits converge. There was no great crash – no love at first sight, but gentle encounters at the ticket desk as he and his buddies purchased tickets home for the weekend.

Morton, Frank, Joe, and Jack gabbed, laughed, and teased Afton at the ticket desk. Frank often talking in double-talk to get her goat and make the others laugh. Fun times for all, then the four friends got on their buses headed to home, family, and friends. Morton would ride the Peerless Stage from Oakland to San Jose, and then board a Greyhound to Salinas.

Morton and Afton’s friendship grew as he would accompany her home on the streetcar. Earl and Faye lived over an old theater in Oakland. The jaunts to get Afton home safely soon turned into dinners with Earl and Faye.

Dates were mainly sitting and talking at Earl and Faye’s home, but one memorable date was to a hotel in Oakland. There they talked, danced, and drank, but Afton didn’t drink, so Morton got her drinks, too.

No one knows how long these arrangements would have gone on, if it hadn’t been for an obscure conversation Morton had with a waitress one evening. After she listened to him go on about Afton, the waitress said, “Well, if you love her, why don’t you marry her?”

So, one night as he left Earl’s, he turned at the bottoms of the stairs and Afton who stood at the top of the stairs. “Afton, will you marry me?” She looked down and said, “Yes, I will.”

Shortly after, Morton went to a jewelry store to buy a ring. While talking with the jewelry Mort said, “What’s the ring really worth?”

“If you are asking that, you don’t really want to get married,” answered the jewelry.

Mort left the store and went to Kay’s Jewelers and purchased a ring.

He gave her the ring in February of 1947. Afton returned to Ogden to get things ready for a March wedding. Mort followed on March 1 to meet her parents Nephi and Matilda Bennett and get ready for the wedding.

On March 8, 1947 in the Bennett living room, they were married. Attending the wedding were: Afton’s parents; her good friend and maid of honor Beth Albert and her husband, Ray; Morton’s best man, a friend from his job at the sugar factory in Spreckles who just happened to live in Ogden, Darrel Hunter; and Emmy and Lloyd, friends of Afton from Roy, Utah.

Driven to Salt Lake by a friend, they had a one night honeymoon at the Newhouse Hotel in Salt Lake. The friend returned the next day and brought them back to Ogden.

The next morning, they took the bus back to Oakland, California to a two room apartment at 38th and Leise, returned to work, and started their new life together.