Bob CollinsAlright, internet, here’s another chance for you to do that thing you do.
Find Tina, the long lost love of Fields Arthur, who was assigned to the Air Force in Osceola, Wis., went into Stillwater on Saturday nights to dance and met Tina Anderson, a 19-year-old phone company operator.
He’s 89 now, Mary Divine of the Pioneer Press reports.
He lives in California now but reached out to the school district to try to find out whatever happened to her. But the district says it couldn’t find any record of a Tina Anderson or Andersen.
Arthur said Anderson caught his eye, and he asked her to dance a slow dance. “We danced three times that night, with long breaks in between dances,” he said.
When it was time to leave, Arthur asked Anderson if she would be back the next week and asked her to “save a slow dance” for him. “The second Saturday, we also danced three times,” he said. “The third Saturday, we sat together and had more time to talk.”
Over the next 10 weeks, the couple “had a great time talking and dancing the slow dances,” he said. “I never did figure how to dance the polka.”
Then he was shipped off to Korea.
He told her he’d be back someday and hoped he’d be stationed near Stillwater.
But he didn’t have her phone number or address. From Korea, he wrote to a friend in Osceola to search the phone book, but there was no Tina Anderson there.
When he returned to the states (San Diego), he called the telephone company for her address but it refused to give it to him.
Life went on. He met a woman in Florida and married her. She died almost two years ago.
“We had a good life,” Arthur told Divine. “We were married 62 years. I just always wondered what happened to Tina. I’m curious to know how she made out in life.”
