“He came to the wrong house,” she laughed with a twinkle in her eyes as she told me the story … again.  Dolores, a forgetful sweetheart, now widowed and living in a nursing home, has a favorite tale to tell anyone who’ll pause a moment and listen.  Perpetually recalling that beautiful moment some 70 years ago when she met her true love in New Orleans during the Second World War, she begins, “His ship was only in port for six hours and he was to meet up with a girl he’d met the month before. He had a first name and a street name but the streets of New Orleans are so twisted, he got turned around. He asked my neighbor where “Dolores” lived and was directed to my house.

     My mother told him I was at work but due home soon and invited him in to wait. She fixed him a pot of tea and a sandwich, sailors were always hungry in those days, and he visited with my family while waiting for me. He told them all about meeting "Dolores" the month before at the USO club and how he’d been looking forward to seeing "Dolores" again.

     My parents smiled and nodded but my sister thought something was fishy because she knew I had not been to the USO the month before and went to get my graduation portrait to show this Navy man. He fell dumb when he looked at it. It was a picture of me, but I was the wrong Dolores. I walked in the door at just about that moment and came over to meet our guest. He said, 'Dolores?' 'Yes,' I smiled back. After a few minutes of awkward stuttering we learned he was looking for a girl named Dolores who lived on the other end of our street!  We all had a good laugh and since he was cute, a real charmer, I offered to make him another pot of tea (and more sandwiches) and we had a grand conversation which led him to ask me out for a coke before his ship set sail.

     While we were walking back to my house we decided to write letters and I gave him my last name and address printed very clearly so his letters would not get lost, like he had. Six months later he got a weekend pass and we got married. I guess the wrong Dolores turned out to be the right Dolores after all!”

At times, fact can be stranger than fiction and this story is case in point. Following a tea history presentation, an older gentleman approached me with humor in his eyes. He wanted to share a memory of his uncle, Sergeant Powers, a World War II soldier attached to a British Supply Unit in the days and weeks following D-Day. Their orders were to resupply troops along the North Sea Coast toward Rhine and, while they were not a combat unit, they got awfully close to the fighting and often had enemy aircraft overhead. His uncle was a young man at the time, a strapping American GI of 21 who did not have much in common with his British counterparts but still, they worked together to get the job done.

At one moment each day the cultural clash reached its apex — 5pm, teatime to the British, even the British delivering supplies to Allied troops! Yes, the entire convoy of trucks pulled off the road at 5pm. One man would go find water, another would set up the cookstove on rocks, or logs, anything available, as a third man, filled the stove with fuel from a geri can. In about 15 minutes all the Brits were standing around opening up field rations and pulling out packets of tea, sugar, and powdered milk. The cook went around filling tin cups with boiling water as the Americans looked on in frustration.

“We could not believe it and still don’t understand how they could sip tea with planes overhead and gunfire not too far away. It seemed, incomprehensible, frivolous, dangerous! But they could not be rushed. Cigarettes were in our field rations so we smoked them and waited for tea time to pass.”  Sergeant Powers said during his attachment to the British unit, they never skipped a tea time.