Giving a shot to a youthful, summer spark

Dawn Pratson & Ed “Skip” Fischer

They met in Harvey Cedars on 80th Street Beach, two among a flock of teenagers whose families spent summers in the Long Beach Island town. Neither Dawn nor Skip were sunbathers; the sand was just the way to the water and the waves they loved to body surf. Their friendship was forged from this shared daily joy.

When summer 1970 ended, Skip and his family returned to Center City and Dawn and hers to Norwalk, Conn. They exchanged goodbyes and addresses, then letters with updates on life in their separate cities a countdown to the next season in the beach town they shared.

****

Skip had walked from his family’s bayside house on West 80th Street to the beach at the end of East 80th before he met Dawn, but now he paused to see if she was on her oceanside porch. One day, he knocked on the door and shyly asked Dawn’s mother if Dawn could go sailing. Her parents liked him right away, as did her three siblings and even the family dog.

“Her mother would invite me over for lunch at least three times a week,” remembers Skip, who is now 67.

“He became part of our family,” said Dawn, now 63.

So went the crest of summer, the trough of winter, for two more seasons. Then Skip sent her cold-weather letters from Carnegie Mellon University. “He has a whimsical sense of humor, and that came through in his letters, which always gave me great delight,” Dawn said. “One was a skinny scroll of tiny sheets of paper taped together, with one or two words on a page. One was on math paper.”

They had always been a little sweet on each other. One summer when Dawn was in her late teens and Skip in his early 20s they held hands and kissed. They didn’t talk about what it meant.

As both got older, jobs and love interests elsewhere kept them from spending the whole summer at the beach. Dawn, a lifelong flutist, had not yet finished her music studies at the University of Hartford when she married her first husband in 1977. Skip was a wedding guest.

“I was delighted for her, and happy to be invited,” he said.

***

Skip wrote news copy for radio stations in Philadelphia and New York, then earned his MBA at Wharton. In the early 1980s, Dawn, by then divorced, came to Philadelphia to audition for what was then Hahnemann Medical College, where she would earn a master’s degree in dance therapy. She stayed with Skip at his apartment at 21st and Waverly, and the romantic sweetness was still there: They held each other and smooched. But by the time Dawn was accepted at Hahnemann and moved to Philadelphia, Skip had moved to New York City to become a financial manager for CBS News.

Dawn graduated, moved to Massachusetts with her then-boyfriend, and married him in 1987. Skip married for the first time the following year. The two couples visited each other, but life was busy, and the old friends fell out of regular contact for a while.

In 1995 both Dawn’s and Skip’s marriages ended in divorce. The friends began calling each other regularly to offer support. Before the year ended, Skip moved to Hartford, Conn., for another media job. He needed a new challenge. A friend’s suggestion that he might like flying small airplanes led to him earning his pilot’s license. Flying is more fun when there’s a destination. Skip asked Dawn, who lived in Gloucester, Mass., if she’d like to have lunch — he could be there in an hour.

In 1999, he moved back to Philadelphia and eventually returned to journalism, writing and editing copy for KYW, a job from which he retired in 2015. His flights to Gloucester continued.

Dawn has had a career in music and dance performance, education, and therapy. She was the founding music teacher at the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School in Center City, from which she retired in 2016, and is currently a Dalcroze Eurhythmics freelance instructor.

When Skip’s flights to Gloucester began, both he and Dawn dated other people, but their friendship became as strong as it had been when they were kids. “Skip became a part of my whole social community,” Dawn said. Her friends loved the cool guy who flew a plane, made them laugh, and paid for everyone’s lunch.

****

In summer 2001, Skip’s family still had their Shore house. Dawn’s parents had sold theirs, but her sister was renting a place and so Skip and Dawn were together again in Harvey Cedars. Just like decades before, he spent time with her family, which now had a new generation. One day, Dawn’s then-teenage niece made a declaration: “You guys should marry each other!”

“We laughed,” said Dawn. “But it planted a little seed.”

The following year, Skip had flown to Massachusetts and was sitting on Dawn’s couch. As always, they were delighting in each other’s company. Dawn, who was in the kitchen, looked at Skip’s face and had a realization that gave her goose bumps: While other relationships had never really fit and always eventually faltered, this one had stretched across decades, states, and life circumstances.

“Wow,” she said out loud. “Maybe we should try this?”

They tried smooching again ― and yep, that still worked!

With all the history they shared, and how well they knew each other, things moved quickly: By the time Skip flew back to Philadelphia, the two had discussed spending their lives together.

“Thank God for that pilot’s license,” said Skip. “I flew up as often as I could.”

That’s not to say they weren’t a little scared at first — were they risking their friendship? They decided to trust in their experience, and in what they had learned about themselves and each other since the summer of 1970.

***

In May 2003, Dawn moved to Philadelphia. After living together for a bit more than a year, they decided to marry. “There was not a traditional proposal. We just started talking about it, and then we were making plans,” said Skip.

During one day of planning, he asked if Dawn would like to have an engagement ring. She had never had one and was so excited that they immediately went to Strawbridge’s and picked one out together.

On July 2, 2005, a friend who got ordained online married them at another friend’s home, which overlooks the ocean in Gloucester. The next day, 60 people gathered to sing and dance on the lawn.

The couple splits most of their time between Old City and Rockport, Mass. Cohabitating has come with some challenges: Dawn is spontaneous and messy and doesn’t always put her things away while Skip the planner is careful and neat, for example.

“Our styles bump into each other sometimes,” said Dawn. But the necessary adjustments seem so small.

“I love being married to a woman who is artistic and interesting and intellectual,” said Skip. “We still enjoy conversations about all kinds of topics, as we have for the past 50 years. Every day is fun.”

“He is delightful,” said Dawn. “He has knowledge about so many different things. I love the way he listens to music and responds to all of the arts. He’s worldly. He’s cute.”

It has worked so well that they sometimes wonder why they didn’t start this life many years ago.

“I was kind of a shy kid,” said Dawn. “Boyfriends pursed me, and I didn’t know how to handle them, really,” she said. Skip seemed so worldly to her back then, and out of her reach.

Skip said he always found Dawn charming and attractive, but wanted to be respectful. Besides, when they were young, the 100-plus miles between them made any off-season relationship practically impossible. So they were whatever unnamed thing they were only on the island.

This couple still loves summer on Long Beach Island.

They see family there — although both sets of parents are now gone. They see old friends. And sometimes, they see friendly ghosts of the past, Skip said. “Every once in awhile we see some teenagers on the beach and we go, ‘Look! That used to be us.’ ”