An interfaith marriage of 60 years ago, when it was not very common

Thanks, Christie Vilsack, for inspiring this with your own story of such a marriage

Christie Vilsack’s wonderful and moving Substack story for the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative a couple of weeks ago about her interfaith Protestant-Catholic marriage got me thinking about the unique interfaith marriage my wife and I shaped and have lived for 60 years.

Oddly, despite a lifetime of writing professionally, I have not written this story before.

The story is framed by two sets of decisions my wife and I made. One was a set of decisions we made together more than 60 years ago, when we were discussing how our then-unusual Jewish-Protestant marriage could work. The other set of decisions ... well, we’ll get there as this story progresses.

So, I grew up very Jewish in Lincoln, Nebraska, a decent-sized city, but with a small Jewish population.

Sixty miles to the northeast, Lynne Baird grew up in Omaha, where her religious experience was exclusively within the Protestant faith.

My story:

My parents were active in their Conservative synagogue, of which my father served as treasurer for several years. I descended from two of the founders of this synagogue, and my father was named for one of them. Both my parents were active in Jewish service organizations. My mother served as president of our Synagogue’s Sisterhood chapter, and my father was president of the local B’nai B’rith chapter.

I was active in a large international Jewish youth organization, holding office at the local, regional, district (multi-state), and national levels.

During college, I taught Sunday School at our synagogue for several years; in part because I thought I knew enough about Judaism to do it well, and in part because it paid $3 an hour, substantially more than any of the three other simultaneous part-time jobs I had at the time.

My wife’s story:

Lynne’s great-grandmother on her maternal side, Sarah Jane Diekman Staves, served on the General Conference of the United Brethren Church in the 1890s, one of the first women to serve in this capacity.

Sarah’s son, Fred Staves, my wife’s grandfather, founded a Methodist church in Des Moines, Iowa, on the city’s East Side, where it still operates. It is named for his family, Staves Memorial United Methodist Church.

My wife’s father played a prominent role in her family’s Presbyterian Church, one block from her home in Omaha. Her best friend growing up was the pastor’s daughter.

She read the bible because she wanted to, both the Old Testament and New Testament, when she was 14.

She attended Brownell Hall, then an Episcopal girls’ high school in Omaha (now the Episcopal co-ed Brownell Talbot School). Her father, William Baird, a president of the Nebraska Bar Association and a founding partner of one of Omaha’s largest law firms, was the commencement speaker at her high school graduation.

We both went our own ways after high school

Lynne enrolled at Monticello College in Alton, Illinois, a girls’ school that her mother and other family members also had attended. I enrolled at the University of Nebraska.

Jews were not welcome at most fraternities at the time. I pledged one of the two Jewish fraternities at Nebraska, Sigma Alpha Mu. I enrolled in mechanical engineering, but it was not a good fit. I transferred to journalism in the middle of my junior year.

Lynne decided that she wanted to be closer to home and transferred to the University of Nebraska for her sophomore year. She pledged at Kappa Alpha Theta sorority there.

We met in the spring of 1961 on a blind date. Thank you, Jane Tenhulzen Olsen, my friend and journalism colleague at Nebraska, and one of Lynne’s sorority sisters.

The relationship somehow clicked from the beginning, even though I spilled a drink on her skirt on our first date.

Lynne had been seriously attached to a young man she had known for several years, but who attended college in his home state, 400 miles away. They did not see each other often enough to overcome what soon became the daily contact she and I enjoyed in Lincoln.

Spin forward a couple of years to the point where we decided we wanted to spend our lives together, despite our significant religious differences.

Neither one of us felt able to fully step forward within the other’s religion. OK, I would still be Jewish, and she, Protestant. But then came the more thorny question of children. After long discussions, I felt that her religion was more important as a part of her life than mine was to me as a part of my life. My faith was not something I thought about as much as she thought about hers. I told her that we could rear our children in her religion. Translation: I wanted to spend my life with her so much that I was willing to concede this point.

We proceeded forward. Neither of our parents were happy. That is an extreme understatement. They all were quite unhappy.

My parents sought out the president of our synagogue in Lincoln, among others, to try to convince me that I was making a mistake. My father asked me not to bring Lynne to our home because it upset my mother so much after I did that once.

Lynne’s father told her that if she proceeded with her planned marriage to me,
“It would cream us,” referring to himself and Lynne’s mother. Lynne refused to yield.

Still, her mother proceeded to plan the wedding at their local Presbyterian Church in Omaha. I told Lynne that my parents would not attend our wedding at a Christian Church. She directed her mother to change the wedding location to a downtown Omaha hotel. The invitations, already printed, were tossed. New ones were ordered. The wedding still would be performed by the Pastor of her church, however.

Soon after the wedding, Lynne and I relocated to Los Angeles, where I would enroll at UCLA in a journalism graduate program leading to a master’s degree. The year together so far from our families was a great way for us to start our life together.

Lynne and Arnie, 1965; married one year. Family photo.

After UCLA, we returned to Omaha, where I had accepted a position as a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald, having interned there the summer before our wedding.

With the Vietnam War breathing down my neck and my student draft deferment no longer keeping me out of the war, the race was on: Could Lynne get pregnant soon enough to keep me out of the war? The answer: Yup. Just in time; just as my number was about to come up at my draft board office in Lincoln.

But now the reality of children was upon us. Scott was born in July 1966. Through the first year or two following his arrival, we saw a lot of both Lynne’s parents and my parents.

During that time, Lynne and I both got to know the others’ parents much better. Both sets of parents seemed to mellow. Lynne’s parents came to feel more comfortable with me, as did my parents with Lynne.

At some point within this time frame, Lynne realized that to rear our children in Christianity would be to cut them off from my parents.

“I can’t do that,” she said.

We began discussing alternative approaches, which resulted in our second set of decisions regarding how our children would be reared in terms of religion.

We would expose our kids to both Christianity and Judaism. We would celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, and Passover – the big family religious holidays – with our children in our home. We would create our own traditions within our family for each of these holidays.

There were two religions at play in our marriage, and both, we decided, could be an asset to our family. We set out to design and manage the process ourselves.

A big surprise and perhaps a pivotal point

In 2019, more than 50 years after we were married and long after all four of our parents had died, Lynne and I were hit with a big surprise.

At this time, I happened to connect with a Jewish lawyer in Omaha who happened to have made contact decades earlier with my father-in-law-to-be, William Baird.

I’ll let Dick Fellman, whose first job out of law school at Nebraska was working for a widely known Jewish lawyer in Omaha, tell the story as he told it to me when we first became acquainted in 2019:

“In the early ‘60s, I was a young lawyer [who was sent by his firm] to get some papers signed by Bill Baird and then take them to the Court to have them entered. I went to Bill's office. He was a gentleman and asked me to have a seat in his private office while he read them. He signed them, and then said, "Dick, you're Jewish, aren't you?" I said, “Yes.”

Bill continued, "If you have a few minutes, I'd like to ask you a few questions. I don't feel close enough to many Jews to feel free to make this inquiry, and my daughter seems to be getting serious with a young Jewish man. Will you stay here a while and visit?" I said, "Yes, of course," and he began.

"Tell me about Christmas, your holidays in the fall, your holiday at Easter time, and what Jews think about intermarriage. We covered the whole spectrum. He listened carefully and often interposed questions. He was the perfect gentleman …

“From that day on, and for many years, Bill and I were friends. We never spent as much time together again, but every time I saw him, he was extremely cordial.

“I never learned what happened to his daughter and whether she ended up marrying a Jew until a few months ago when I was having dinner here in Omaha with Herb Friedman . . .”

Herb Friedman, a lawyer in Lincoln, is my first cousin, and we are very close. He and Dick were law school classmates at Nebraska, and with their surnames being Fellman and Friedman, they often sat next to each other in classrooms where alphabetic seating was used.

Dick continued his story:

“Herb began speaking about you and the fact that you married Bill Baird's daughter, and I then told Herb this story.

“I think enough time has now gone by that I'm not breaking any confidences in relating my hour or so with Bill so many years ago.”

I realized that this may have been a pivotal point in helping Lynne’s father to understand and accept both Judaism and his daughter’s decision. And I wondered whether my parents, also, might have had some experience or realization that helped them to adjust to this unwanted life situation.

In any event, perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, my parents came to respect Lynne’s parents, and vice versa.

Lynne’s parents even attended a Garson family Passover dinner – Seder – with us at the home of my aunt and uncle in Lincoln in 1966 or ’67.

Our children loved both sets of grandparents. And without any formal religious training, the in-home rituals of both Judaism and Christianity have been important in shaping who our children are and how they live.

Given the framework we established, it is hard to ask for more than that.

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