By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
My father waited in early June 1964 with trembling anticipation in the Pan American terminal at San Francisco International Airport for the arrival of a cross-country flight from New York City. When the airplane arrived and passengers started streaming into the lounge, Raymond Cheek’s heart must have been pumping a thousand beats a minute. He would meet for the very first time the woman he would marry in five days.
Their courtship story started a couple of years before when my dad picked up a pen-pal magazine and saw the photo of Gisela Margarete Drückler, a native of Berlin. She wanted to improve her English language skills and he wanted to improve his German. That’s how they came to start corresponding through the mail, writing letters and sending reel-to-reel tape recordings. In Germany, Fräulein Drückler had worked as a professional fashion model and photographer, sometimes standing in front of the camera lens, sometimes behind it. As they got to know each other through words exchanged across thousands of miles, mom and dad’s romantic passions bloomed.
Gisela and Raymond Cheek on their wedding day.
Photo courtesy Marty Cheek
With her cinema star looks, mom had never been at a loss for suitors. One of them whom she had met at photography school was a German baron who asked her several times to be his wife. But she had said “nein” to all offers. Then a quiet man who worked as a high school music teacher in the farming town of Hollister proposed through a letter that she come to California and they get married and live the rest of their lives together. Against the wishes of her parents, Gisela said “ja.”
The bride journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean on the ocean liner MS Berlin. Passing through the harbor as the ship approached the New York City dock a half century ago, Gisela and other passengers got a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty welcoming them with a beacon of light and hope. Gisela then made her way to LaGuardia Airport by cab and later found herself 30,000 feet in the clouds flying across the 2,905-mile span of America to San Francisco.
That instant in the Pan American waiting lounge as my mom and dad eyed each other for the first time must have been a decisive moment in their lives. As dad drove his 1958 Plymouth Fury down Monterey Road on the way to Hollister, mom got her first glimpse of the communities of the South Valley — Morgan Hill, San Martin, and Gilroy. Those American small towns to the immigrant must have seemed exceedingly different to the cosmopolitan city of Berlin she had left only days before.
On June 8 in the chapel of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollister, Gisela Drückler and Raymond Cheek slipped rings on each other’s fingers. They would remain married until dad died Jan. 10, 1985 at Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital. Mom died at the Morgan Hill Saint Louise Hospital June 8, 1993, the anniversary of her wedding. Her ashes were scattered in the San Francisco Bay not far from the place where she first met — in a Pan Am terminal — the man she married.
A month or so from now, we will celebrate our American heritage with the annual Freedom Fest celebrations centering on the Fourth of July holiday. This year’s festival theme is Destination America. Every immigrant has a story — an adventure story or a romance story — of how they arrived in the United States. Every immigrant’s journey is a story of hope for a brighter, happier future in the land of liberty. My mom lived one of those stories.
