First Waltz: A Chesapeake Heritage Novel

by Terry L. White

A Chesapeake Heritage Novel

“Terry L. White’s The First Waltz is a compelling portrait of a marriage, filled with interesting characters and a page turning story.

"Starting in the days of World War II in the Eastern Shore town of Cambridge, at the dance when Sally, a pretty young nursing student, means Henry, a handsome soldier from Upstate New York, first meet, the story progresses through their lives and their love, their families and their children. There are trials and tribulations; life is after all, what happens when you’re making other plans.

The story never falters, and keeps the reader turning the pages to see what will happen next. What renders this tale especially charming is Ms. White’s eye for time and place, and the mise-enscene of another time and another era in American history. Weaving details of that era skillfully into the fabric of the novel, the War and post-war periods and the small town life of ordinary people in Maryland and New York become characters in the story, so real you can taste the cooking and see the homes and places. This is a great read.“

–Helen Chappell, Baltimore Sun columnist and author of the Hollis Ball and Sam Wescott Ghost Series, Oysterback Tales, A Whole World of Trouble and Looking for Midnight.

ISBN 978-1-61386-044-1

CHAPTER 1

This is a story about lovers, which is always a good place to start when a story unfolds. It is also a story about faith, which was in great supply during the year 1943. The planet was at war and America was neck-deep in patriots who believed in God and country. America was going all out to keep the world safe for democracy, but that was a heck of a job, and the conflicts around the globe added up to what turned out to be another world war. We had young men in Europe, North Africa, India, flying over Greenland and all over the Far East and Pacific Ocean. If you added up the numbers, you might be surprised there were so many young men who answered the call and put themselves in harm’s way for the ideal of freedom.

This is not the story of movie stars or famous people. Susie Boyer lived in the little factory town of Cambridge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Henry Snyder hailed from a tiny Adirondack logging town in upstate New York. It is plain to see these were two young people who might never have met if there had not been a war to end them all.

Susie was a good girl from a good family and if things hadn’t got so ugly overseas, she probably would have married some nice young man she had known since first grade and kept a tidy house not too far from Race Street where commerce thrived and young people stopped at Whitey Barth’s Candy Land for ice cream sodas on Friday nights. Susie was a good girl, the eldest daughter of a respectable family, a hard-working woman child who wanted the good things in life and expected them to come to her by dint of hard work and faith in God’s everlasting supply.

Henry? He was from Tupper Lake, New York, a logging town near the Canadian border most people never heard of then or now. I’ll tell you more about Henry Snyder later, but suffice it to say this was a young man with a clear vision for his future.

Henry Snyder knew what he wanted and he didn’t stop until he got it. He had a plan for his life—a good woman, handsome children and enough work to keep the wolf away from the door; but he didn’t know when he was a young man that the winds of fate would carry him to the tidewater Maryland where sitting on the porch was family entertainment and a good man could catch his limit of blue crabs and rockfish from the Choptank River most any pleasant summer day.

Henry, who was used to high crisp air of the Adirondack mountains, was sent to Cambridge to guard some German prisoners of war—although where these prisoners might have escaped to boggled the common man’s imagination—since the county of Dorchester lies on a peninsula fashioned of leftovers from Maryland and Virginia and lies on a spit of land that also includes pretty much all of Delaware and is near about entirely surrounded by water and wetlands.