Adventures with Batman

I always smile when I think of an incident that happened in the summer of 1967.  I was between my junior and senior years of college, having already finished nursing school.  I had come home to live with my parents for the summer, and I was working as an RN at the local hospital, which still had a diploma nursing school program, so they had a nurses’ dorm.

Bill, my then boyfriend (later my husband), and I had begun dating the prior summer.  It was our habit to attend the Sunday evening church service together, and then go to his parents’ home for something to eat after church.  Typically, we had a big dinner and weren’t hungry for supper until late in the evening.  His mother had often served roast beef for Sunday dinner, so there was beef left over for sandwiches.

One evening, Bill had fixed roast beef sandwiches with lettuce, tomato and mayo, and we were enjoying those when the phone rang.  The call was for Bill, and the caller was a student nurse who we knew from church.  She was calling from the nurses’ dorm in an agitated state.  It seems that there was a bat flying around in a suite of bedrooms in the dorm, and there was no one available in hospital maintenance to get rid of it.  The girls were damsels in distress, and for some reason, they decided Bill was the person to call.

Whether this was flirtation on the part of the caller, I was not sure.  One thing I was sure of was that my boyfriend was not going to go into the nurses’ dorm by himself! 

I rode along to the nurses’ dorm and went in with Bill.  The housemother and several girls were milling about in the lobby of the residence, afraid to enter the suite where the bat had been seen.  One of the girls handed Bill a badminton racquet.  I chuckled to myself that it was a BAT-minton racquet.  The girls pointed to a door into the suite, and off Bill went.  We could hear the sound of him moving about and the swish of the racquet.  I think it was less than 5 minutes when he returned with the bat wrapped in a paper towel.

The girls were grateful.  He disposed of the bat.  I felt tagging along with him had made it clear he was mine!

Afterward, I sometimes laughingly called him Batman.