The most obvious answer is: Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe, the bombshell blonde who had an amazing show business career and who died an untimely death at its height.

However, The Norma Jean I'm wondering about is Norma Jean Salina.  In the mid-1940s, when she was 14 and I was 16, I was the first boy Norma Jean was allowed to date — and she was the first girl I ever kissed.  Norma Jean was born in Salina, Kansas in the early 1930s.

When we met Norma Jean was a student at Immaculate Heart Catholic Girls' High School in Los Angeles and I had recently dropped out of Hollywood High.  We met when she was shopping in a Ralph's Market where I worked as a boxboy.  For me it was love at first sight, and she was pleased when I finally got up enough never to ask her to go to the movies with me.  We dated off and on until I went into the army in 1948.

I've posted a few pages that tell the stories of those happy times (Love at First Sight - Norma Jean Salina) but, sadly, I have no photos of her.  I did have two pictures of her — one a snapshot of her standing in front of her house, and the other a professional portrait done in a studio.  However, my wife confiscated them shortly after we got together and I never saw them again.

Nonetheless, I have found some paintings on the Internet that look amazingly like she had posed for them.  Here are a couple of images of how she looked in her mid to late teens.

I fell hopelessly in love with Norma Jean the first time she smiled at me, and subsequently had serious misgivings about joining the army.  I feared ending up somewhere thousands of miles away and not knowing if I would ever see her again.  However, making a living as a 17-year-old dropout was not easy, and my mother's determination to control every aspect of my life made joining the army the only viable option I had at the time.

Norma Jean and I wrote to each other periodically while I was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia and we had a couple of dates when I was able to hitchhike back to Hollywood while on leave.  We didn't correspond very often while I was in Korea, but we did reconnect after I was discharged in 1951.

However, my new job with Cornet Stores took me to different cities around Southern California, and I carelessly lost touch with Norma Jean.  Letting her slip through my fingers was one of the biggest mistakes — if not the biggest mistake — I've ever made in my life.

The last time I saw Norma Jean was in 1953 when she called and asked if I would like to take her to a movie in which she had played a small part.  She had already done a TV commercial as the White Rain Shampoo Girl, in which she was cute as a button dancing and singing in a transparent raincoat while "white rain" gently fell on her transparent umbrella.  I can see that commercial in my mind as if it were yesterday.  But the movies — "Wow!" I remember thinking, "Just imagine, my Norma Jean in the movies!"

Well, the truth is she never really was my Norma Jean.  Yes, I wanted her to be mine more than I've ever wanted anything.  But at that point in time, taking her to this movie was sure to be the highlight of my young life.

However, it turned out to be an embarrassing and uncomfortable situation all the way around.  The movie, Torch Singer with Joan Crawford, was a real turkey and Norma Jean's part lasted less than a minute.  She was one of several star-struck teenagers who had flocked around "the torch singer" in hopes of getting an autograph.

Norma Jean was actually listed in the credits as "Margaret" — so she may have had a bigger part that ended up on the cutting room floor.  In any case, the whole idea of teenage girls going gaga over a female lounge singer seemed ridiculous, to say the least.  If teenie boppers were going to mob a singer for an autograph in 1953, it would have been a male vocalist such as Eddie Fisher or Tony Bennett.

Furthermore, Torch Singer was one of the absolute worst movies I've ever seen.  Norma Jean felt the same way.  In fact, it was the kind of movie I normally would have walked away from during its first 15 minutes.  But I painfully sat through the whole thing only because Norma Jean was in it.  However, I could tell it was just as painful for her.

Well, that was the last time I ever saw Norma Jean — but not because of the movie.  My job kept me with Cornet busy in places far away from her, and I just didn't make the effort to maintain contact.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

But I have never stopped thinking about her.  Now, some five decades since out last meeting, I think about her every day — and frequently dream about her.  Some of the dreams are frustratingly happy ones, in which I find her and take her to be my own.  The frustrating part is waking up to realize it was only a dream.

Well, so much for grasping at straws in the wind.  I keep hoping she or someone she knows will see her name mentioned on this site and send me an email.  If it never happens, however, I'll have to be content with my memories and my dreams.