10/18 column: How'd You Meet?

Anytime I’m in a group of people I’ve just met, I inevitably ask, “How did you meet your spouse?” It’s one of my favorite party games.

And let me tell you, there are some great stories out there — both serendipitous and determined.

There’s Sara, who reconnected with her high school crush at their 10-year reunion. They missed most of the reunion — but now have a three-year marriage and new baby to show for it.

There’s Missy, who met David in Florida — only to discover they’d grown up two hours apart in Minnesota. She spent the next year trying to fix him up with her single friends until she realized she wanted him to herself. They’re now expecting their second child.

There’s my own grandfather, a doctor who moved to northern Minnesota after the war. The first time he met his future wife, a baby-faced, 4-foot-11-inch sprite of a woman, my grandmother was being wheeled into surgery for an appendectomy. Grandpa saw her going in and said, loud enough for her to hear, “She looks like a child!” They’ve been married 50-plus years, so she must not hold a grudge.

Sometimes I don’t even have to ask for the stories. Sometimes they’re just handed out.

At the Golden Generations show this month, an energetic lady named Gloria announced, “I have to tell you how I met my husband sometime. It’s a good story.”

I called her at home a few days later and she didn’t disappoint.

It was 1945. Gloria was living in Minneapolis, where she’d sometimes take a bus to the Wilt Chamberlain naval base with the USO to dance with the sailors.
One night a sailor who was shipping out the next day asked for Gloria’s phone number. He wanted to call her to say goodbye.

“We had real strict rules,” says Gloria. “I told him we weren’t allowed to give our phone numbers, but that if he gave me the number at the base, I would call him to say goodbye.”

The next night, Gloria made herself a mug of Campbell’s soup, got into her dad’s flannel pajamas and made the call. The voice on the other end of the phone, she says, “was the prettiest voice I’d ever heard — with a thick southern accent.”

But when Gloria asked the southerner for the sailor she’d met the previous night, he said, “Well, there ain’t nobody here but me. Ain’t I good enough to talk to?”

“Well, I’m sure you’re good enough to talk to,” Gloria answered. “But you’re not who I want to talk to.”

“How do you know if you won’t talk to me?” the mystery man teased.

Gloria couldn’t argue. They ended up talking and laughing for the next four hours. She learned he had just arrived at the base, and that everyone else — including the sailor she’d called for — had already shipped out.

Before getting off the phone, they arranged a blind date for the next night. “We met downtown at a place where I could watch who came in,” says Gloria. “I figured if he looked OK, I’d talk to him. If not, I’d walk out the door and be gone.”

She didn’t walk. Instead, they went out that night. And the next night. And the next four nights in a row. And then they got engaged.

In two weeks time, they were married. Gloria and Lucius (Pat) Patrick will celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary this April.

“It’s a successful, wonderful marriage,” Gloria says of the union that’s brought two sons, two daughters, 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren into their lives.

“But how did you know it’d be so good?” I implored. “After just two weeks?”

“We didn’t,” laughed Gloria on the phone that day. “There was really nothing to it — he was a very nice, very polite, good-looking young man. I looked at him and thought that’s what I wanted. And he looked at me and thought that’s what he wanted. And I don’t think we’ve ever had a moment of not agreeing that this was the way to go.”