Ferrell kept his brother Ernie (or June), among others, informed during the early developing romance between himself and Lou and Lila.31 He certainly prided himself on capturing the attention of such a pretty girl, Lila, while sharing her picture with others (“the pleasantries of East Lansing life”); Lou, contrarily, was tall and thin, and this required some defensive remarks. Lila was a decade younger than her favorite MSC history lecturer; Lou, only six years his junior. History teacher and Lila relished traveling to big cities, Chicago and Detroit; she enjoyed cooking for him; Lou did not. As Ferrell coyly mused when introducing Lila to his long-time friend, Waldo, “my office assistant here has been doing some assisting at the apartment—frying pork chops for hungry history teachers, making popcorn, reading books to history teachers with tired eyes, running around the apartment with green shorts, etc. etc. Lila is quite the girl.”32 A month later, he was bragging that by ten o’clock, Lila had cooked “up some steaks . . . [wearing] blue shorts . . . and time passed quickly, without thinking of eating.” In the same letter though, Ferrell admitted that there was a “confusing situation in Springfield, Mass. which I have to look at in August.” This, of course, was his continued interest in Lou. But, again, to friends Bob and Kit, after the Spring semester at MSC had ended, Bob shared: “my present research assistant . . . is staying around working . . . and what time she has to spare, she spares it in my apartment wearing red shorts. Ummm.”33 Both Lila and Lou studied psychology and sociology to prepare for their careers caring for the underprivileged, yet Lou relished the opportunity to expound social science theories, whereas Ferrell underscored that Lila “never talks in the psychological jargon which we both detest.”
There was likely more to the delight Bob took in Lila, beyond, as he stated, “her obvious talent,” rooted in their shared experiences growing up and hardship.34 She helped out as a farmer’s daughter near Quincy, Michigan; he, on a farm during stretches of the Great Depression after his father lost a banking job. In Ferrell’s words, Lila “came from the farm; her father, Earl Sprout (a typical country name) raised cattle in . . . Coldwater, Michigan. She . . . never had a great deal of help in getting through college. Her father paid her tuition now and then, but that was about all, and Lila earned the rest.”35 Lou possessed a more refined set of social and intellectual skills that likely fit better with Ferrell’s educated set of family members.36 Unlike the Ferrell family, Lila was the only college attendee among her immediate family and smoked and drank.37 But Bob and Lila both knew something of earning one’s way through hard work. The two also shared a common language of evangelical Protestant faith (the Church of the Nazarene and that of the Methodist), if not the devotion, while Lou had ties to Lutheran traditions. Conventional institutional religion, whether based in church doctrine, ritual, or in evangelical fervor, carried little weight with any of them, and Bob was noticeably disenchanted with church members’ hypocrisy.38
By mid-summer 1953, Ferrell sent a letter to his brother’s family, making comparisons between the new love interest, Lila, and the Smith College graduate Lou, reinforcing some points of distinction between the two.
Lou was a very nice girl in many ways, but she was chuck full of psychological jargon and fake sociology, and she also had a lot of false ideas about living in general: she disliked cooking; at one time more than hinted that I might turn her into a ‘domestic’ (lord, I wouldn’t do that to anyone!); whereas Lila likes to cook, can cook excellently, and there’s nothing I like better than to sit down to one of her pork chop dinners. As for vital statistics, Lila is a very pretty blond, about 5’5.
The difficulty, to Ferrell, with either Lou or Lila was that they were not ready to quit the professional track nor take on the family role that the rising history scholar had for them.39 Lila rejected the low-level job prospects Bob had found for her before coming to Bloomington; the pay would not meet livable standards; the work would not satisfy her; and she could not likely “pass a typing test.”40 It took little time for Lila to reconsider joining him. By the end of summer 1953, she left Bob for Detroit and a job at the State of Michigan Department of Social Welfare.41 Lou would move closer (than Springfield, Massachusetts) to the newly ensconced IU history assistant professor but stop well short of Bloomington, perhaps thinking that she could lure him back to his boyhood hometown of Lakewood, a suburb of Cleveland.42 Breaking away from work to visit their suitor was difficult due to the overwhelming load that social workers engaged. Lila shared that she could not come for a planned weekend as thought due to the busy scheduled “contact day,” when “clients” came by to complain about their checks, etc.43 Ferrell believed such absences created a hardship impossible to overcome.
Cousin Christine’s husband Robert Bryant, a graduate student in theology, counseled his cousin-in-law after trouble appeared between Ferrell and Lou, partly at least stirred by her commitment to social work.44 The MSC history lecturer had proposed marriage to Lou in February 1953, but he did not get the response expected.45 Instead of a gushing yes, Lou hesitated, “all tied up in psychological doubts and inhibitions and all mixed up in what her future would be or ought to be.” Without allaying her beau’s ego, Lou headed to a conference of psychology lectures in Cleveland, then to a Smith College cocktail party. No affirmative message arrived as Bob waited. Then Lou turned down the possibility of a New York get-together with Ferrell because she had to attend professional seminars that crowded the weekends. Ferrell felt he was “being made a fool of” and wrote several letters to Lou calling the whole thing off. Now, perhaps he was reaching out to his cousins for affirmation and advice.
The problem, as Bryant (and Christine no doubt) saw it, was several-fold. Lou’s mix of professional training and personal insecurity contrasted with that of the research historian’s; Lou’s work focused on a Freudian orientation, from a psychological and/or psychiatric perspective, on analysis of inner conflict, on dealing with personal problems. This training was a break from the narrow upbringing that Lou had experienced growing up, and it required some caution, on her part, in seeing relationships and the world in optimistic, overly simplistic and uncomplicated terms that Ferrell’s words seemed to suggest.46 Bryant also described the women’s changing professional expectations that Lou likely felt uncertain Ferrell would appreciate her professional training as a “psychiatric social worker.” To Bryant, Ferrell had to readjust his thinking about the role of wives and respect their professional choices. Requiring wives to be cooks, seamstresses, and household managers, with no consideration of their professional aspirations was an outdated way of thinking.
After more than a year passed, little had changed between the Hoosier historian’s outlook on courtship intentions and that of his girls, Lou or Lila. While arranging a trip to see Bob at IU toward the end of her social work service, Lila wrote: “Forgot while talking with you I would be out in the field all day. Thought this morning I may be able to get back to the office but presently I am at the [Detroit] Welfare offices and see that the two cases I have to read are pretty fat.” Along with large caseloads, there were investigations yet to be finished and “reinvestigations,” at least nine of which were “due at the end of the month.”47 In another note, sharing her hectic life as a social worker, Lila relayed that she had put in her resignation at the welfare agency and was preparing to come to Bloomington, close to Christmas:
Everyone is rather disappointed I signed the [resignation] papers. . . . It’s leaving a lot of work for the remaining workers. I’ll have to do 23 reinvestigations besides the 12 applications