By: Genesis Thompson
90’s love. The best type of generational love. Even in the late 1980s early ‘90s, McPherson College wasn’t what it is today. The enrollment class was roughly under 400 students. So, everyone really did know everyone. Which seems like finding love here was easier than ever and a lot faster than what it is now. Linda and Dave Barrett are a married couple who met at McPherson College at that time.
The couple shared an 8 a.m. class. Linda, who was a cute, shy and charismatic freshman, sat in the front of the classroom while Dave, who was a typical junior student-athlete, sat in the back. They met in Dotzour Hall while Linda was staying with some teammates from the Women’s Basketball team. Dave was on the Men’s Basketball team. So, sports hanging out with adjacent sports, the Men’s Basketball team would walk from Metzler Hall to Dotzour Hall to hang out with the basketball women. Linda naturally grew close with the men’s and women’s basketball team and that’s how she met her now-husband Dave Barrett. They started hanging out her freshman year spring semester and grew to be each other’s close good friends.
If you were a traditional student and not married, you typically lived on campus and social media nor texting was a thing back then, so social interaction would either happen in person or you had to go to the end of the halls and use one of the phones attached to the wall, called “dorm hall phones.” “They called the one in Metzler the Bat Phone,” said Linda. Dave never really asked her out due to their friendship and also because he didn’t have a car on campus; they mainly only hung out in social groups. “If he wanted me to hang out in his room, I would make my friend go with me,” said Linda. She wasn’t one of those girls who would ever just walk on over to Metzler by herself. Little did we all know everything would still be the same now.
They were genuinely good friends and that was part of the reason why they never dated. They thought that if they did date, and it didn’t work out, then the friendship would be tarnished and that was something neither of them wanted to ever happen because they would have been friends for so long. They decided to take the chance Linda’s senior year and began dating. They married in 1993 so roughly about three years after Dave graduated in 1990 and Linda in 1992, even though Dave wanted to wait and not get married when they were freshly out of college. He wanted to have money to start a great foundation for them, but that didn’t happen.
Dave had a great plan for the proposal. Dave was into collecting baseball cards so he would take Linda to the card shops to look at sports cards, even though Linda wasn’t really interested in sports cards. Instead, she would check out the cards that had the good looking dudes on them like Scott Erickson who played for Minnesota at the time and who Mrs. Barrett thought was hot. Dave started buying her sports cards that had Erickson on them that were supposed to be hers. One day when she got home from work, they were having dinner and Dave pulled out a baseball that said, “Will you marry me?” At the bottom of the note had Mr. Erickson’s signature on it. So, she was completely caught up on the fact that Erickson had written this and signed this and said to Dave, “Oh yeah sure.” She still has the ball to this day! They will be celebrating 30 years of love together. They have two beautiful children together who also graduated from McPherson College and they have one granddaughter and a grandson on the way.
When asked if they had any advice to give to people who are marrying their fellow peers, they said that you should choose someone who is going to help you grow and have those lifelong friends that you can call on and travel with. They also think that having more personable conversations instead of using social media to communicate helps. Both of them also agreed that the dating scene now is a lot harder due to social media.
To have a love story like theirs, get out of your comfort zone and go have those face-to-face conversations. Get off social media and connect with the person you want to be with and go out in the world. This love story is one of the best ones to come out of McPherson College.
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