SEQUIM — Bill Fatherson doesn’t hear every word you say to him — his new hearing aids are to be delivered soon — but when his wife, Nina, throws her head back and laughs, he drinks it in.
He turns to look at her as if she’s a glass of apple juice on a late-summer day.
“On our first date, I knew I didn’t want to let her go,” Bill said. “She was a really sweet girl.”
On the blind date, set up by Bill’s cousin, it quickly became clear that the girl didn’t want to let the guy go, either.
“I told him a fib,” Nina said, explaining that Bill was 21, a worldly young man who’d just gotten out of the service.
“I told him I was 18,” she admitted.
It was January 1948, and Nina Parker and Bill Fatherson were dancing to the country band that had pulled into the Mount Pleasant Grange Hall.
She was in fact 15.
Nina celebrated her 16th birthday Feb. 4, 1948 — and 10 days later she and her beau celebrated Valentine’s Day by going to Weisfield’s Jewelers in Port Angeles.
