Bridal Section

By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Staff Writer

In this day of Internet dating, it's nice to know there is still a wide range of ways that people meet each other and fall in love. All are, in their own way, romantic for those involved, and one common element in the telling of their tales is a certain glint in the eye, a smile in the voice.

In this, the week before Valentine's Day, some true love stories for your heart-warming pleasure.....

* * * *

Talk about romantic! In the first act of "La Boheme," Mimi knocks on her neighbor Rodolpho's door seeking a match to re-light her candle. Rodolpho, smitten by the girl's fragile beauty, slyly blows out his own candle, and in the resulting darkness, the two crawl on the floor searching for a lost key. Their hands touch and....

When Jeanie Rives of Peachtree City called The Citizen to tell how her parents met, she described a scene that evoked Puccini's opera.

World War II was winding down and Rives' Italian-American father, a sergeant with the U.S. forces that took the beaches in France, was stationed in Swansea, South Wales.

He was with his buddies at a Swansea pub on a spring evening in 1945, when a local girl, leaving with her friends, realized she had lost a brooch she had borrowed from her mother. The young soldier had a flashlight and helped her search for the pin her mother's favorite, naturally.

They found a swirly gold heart-shaped pin instead, but no brooch. When she went home, the lass told the truth, and her mother was understandably upset.

The chance encounter, however inspired by the talisman? turned to romance for the young people, who married that October. Jeanie was born the following year, two months after her mother arrived in America "with thousands of wartime brides."

Although the brooch was never found, her mom has kept the little heart all these years and, "as the oldest of her four daughters," Rives plans to keep it after her mother is gone.

* * * *

Beth Snipes, a Fayette County photographer whose work appears often in The Citizen, says she got engaged without really meaning to but adds quickly that she's had no regrets.

She met John when one of her girl friends, pulling out of a gas station, hit another car, and began dating the Marine who was driving it.

"I got to know him and his friends," Snipes said, and when they were sent to Vietnam, John was there. "So John would start adding messages on to Lee's letters he was real funny."

When John finished his tour in 'Nam and was transferred back to the States, "I picked him up at the airport, and that's how we met."

But the engagement? What about the engagement?

"John thinks I'm just kidding, but this is true," Snipes said. "He had a real deep Southern accent and one evening he mumbled something real fast he was nervous and just to sort of keep the conversation going, I nodded and said yes, and he got so excited and started talking about, oh, this wonderful life we'd have together. When I realized what I had agreed to, I wasn't so sure I wanted to do that."

To hear Snipes talk, she couldn't make a graceful escape, and as a result, has been married to John for 27 "really fun" years. She and John have two grown daughters and a teen-age son.

* * * *

Another unlikely story with military links comes from a Peachtree City couple who preferred to be unnamed. Call them Rudy and Cela.

Cela is a Filipino. Rudy was stationed at Wallace Air Station, a little radar site near San Fernando, on the west coast of Luzon Island. He was taken with her long black hair and fell for her from the first moment he saw her, getting drinking water at his base. She was 20.

Let Cela tell her story:

"I was a little bit off balance. My parents just went back to their province [Isabela, on the east side of the mountains]. We evacuated because where we used to live, there was a lot of guerilla activity, a lot of killing. Because we had left everything we owned, we don't have enough money or things to get income, and very little land, so I decided to work as a housemaid in San Fernando.

"Rudy saw me and asked my friend [if I'd go out], and I said no. He doesn't take no for an answer. He said, 'Oh, come on, let's go,' and he picked me up and put me in the front of his truck. I could understand everything they were saying, but he doesn't know I could speak that good English.

"After about three dates, he says, 'How about getting married?' Only not directly. He says, 'How long would the paperwork take to finish for an American to get married here?'

"I heard it was about six months. He says, 'Six months, eh? Okay.'

"I wasn't sure if he had asked me to marry him or not, but he brought the paperwork and asked me to sign something.

"Where I grew up, a lot of people I knew were engaged mostly three years. The fiance goes abroad and then gets home and gets married. There are still some arranged marriages. I came from a tribe that has arranged marriages, but my parents didn't do that."

The lieutenant sent her home to see her parents. Her father is a broom maker and was working on a grass broom when she arrived.

"He looked at me and said, 'Uh huh did you come home to tell us you're getting married?'"

Despite her people's belief that it's bad luck for younger siblings in a family to get married before the older ones, Cela's family was "happy, yet sad," she said. "The U.S. is so far off. They thought it was as far away as Manila about 150 miles.

"I stay there for a week, helped with farm work. After that I went back. Rudy was going crazy, thought I wouldn't be back. We were married in San Fernando with friends [present], but my parents didn't make it."

Never mind. Rudy went to see her family before he married Cela. What was that meeting like?

"They hadn't seen much of Americans," Cela said. "The last time was World War II. My Mom says, They all look the same to me."

Cela's adjustment to modern American culture is another story, but it's enough to say this improbable match-up produced an honor-student son, nearly 16, and is going strong after nearly 20 years. Their faces still light up when they look at each other.

* * * *

People were meeting through printed personals long before the advent of the Internet. A couple in their mid-60s had been married about a year when they met a Citizen reporter among a group of tourists stranded on an Alaska Marine Highway ferry in Canada in 1997.

She was a widow, he a divorcee, and friends who saw how lonely they were urged them to place ads in their respective hometown newspapers.

Their reaction was the same: "At my age?" But just for fun, they did, and eventually saw each other's ad. They met discreetly at a restaurant, and in a few months, Frank and Ruth Rappold of East Troy, Wis., married.

They are tan and wiry, share a passion for sailing, camping, and cycling, and after only a few years of marriage, actually resemble each other.

Their children approved whole-heartedly of their parent's new spouse and of the process. In fact, according to the Rappolds' Christmas card, Ruth's daughter is getting married next summer to a man SHE met through an ad in the personals. "It really does work!" Ruth wrote.

* * * *

Last month Cal Beverly stunned his staff by posting a notice of his engagement on the office bulletin board. The announcement shattered their perception of The Citizen's publisher as a dispassionate newsman, and one not overly interested in the potential of the Internet.

Beverly met Joyce Drinkwater of Louisville, Ga., in July through the Christian Connection, an Internet dating service. The mother of 13- and 9-year-old sons is owner and publisher of the only newspaper in Jefferson County, southwest of Augusta.

Drinkwater accepted Beverly's diamond ring on Christmas Eve, and the wedding will take place sometime in 1999, probably in her Methodist church in Louisville. Beverly asserts that the reaction of his adult children ranges from ecstatic to cautious; her sons are acquiescent.

Back to the Top of the PageBack to the Special Sections Home Page