It has been over 40 years since one of his future wife’s girlfriends gave Bob Wilson the phone number of Gina DeVictor that weekend in New Orleans, and he still remembers it by heart.
614-878-5069.
He repeats it over and over as Bob, Gina, and I sit at a high-top table at a Mountain Brook Mexican spot on a rainy Saturday. He called it more than just a few times during their long-distance courtship in the late 1970s, before reaching your beloved was as easy as a text or a FaceTime. Bob even proposed to Gina by dialing those 10 digits.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
***
When I started this blog, I was originally looking for love stories of people who waited longer than “normal” (although what really is normal, anyway?) to find love. People who looked and looked and didn’t find the one until their mid- to late thirties and beyond. Bob and Gina Wilson don’t fit into that category. They met when they were both young – Gina was a teenager. But as I thought about the broader purpose of my blog, I realized that an unexpected love story is just as compelling, at least to me, as a delayed-but-not-denied love story.
And it doesn’t get much more unexpected than the way the Wilsons met.
Literally everything had to be just so for them to meet that New Year’s Eve night in 1977. If Bob hadn’t gone here and Gina hadn’t gone there, there would be no 37-year marriage. It is a love story of the right place at the right time, when two lives intersect out of nowhere and where a bond keeps the connection going over years of dating other people, living in different states, and living separate lives – yet something, something, keeps the flame burning until finally it is undeniable: Bob Wilson was meant to marry Gina DeVictor.
There is magic in the unexpected.
***
As Gina tells it, had she been in school at Ohio State at the time of the 1978 Sugar Bowl, there’s no way she could have or would have made the trip from Columbus, Ohio to New Orleans for the game. As it was, though, she was working at Nationwide Insurance for a year before entering nursing school, and she and three other girls – including one of her three sisters – decided to go support their Buckeyes down South. They flew down in time to go out for New Year’s Eve, which fell on a Saturday in 1977; if you know anything about New Orleans, every Saturday night on Bourbon is a party – and New Year’s Eve is a party times a bazillion.
Unlike most New Year’s Eve revelers, Gina and one of her girlfriends went to mass at St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square that night. If you know Gina, you know one of the cornerstones of her life – if not the cornerstone – is her unshakable faith. Before making the trip to New Orleans, Gina had broken up with a boy and was still nursing a broken heart from the experience. At mass that night, she said a prayer that would be answered much, much sooner than she could have ever dreamed:
“God, when the time is right, help me meet the right person.”
She didn’t expect it to be that night.
***
Gina and her girlfriend had gotten separated from the other two girls in their party. After they left mass, they were walking around when Gina got an overwhelming sense that she was being followed. She turned around, and an old man was getting too close for comfort – so she and her friend ducked into literally the first building, the first door, they could find. It was the Royal Sonesta Hotel; the lobby was still decorated for Christmas. An open party for Alabama and Ohio State fans had broken out, and there was a cash bar in the corner. On December 31, 1977, the legal age to drink in New Orleans was 18, not 21. The girls passed the age test for a drink and decided to stay.
Just as Gina and her girlfriend walked in, Bob Wilson, in town from Tuscaloosa with his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers, noticed her. He spotted her “Go to Hell Alabama” button and was intrigued. Her hat had sugar cubes emblazoned on it, in honor of the Sugar Bowl. He thought she seemed like a really nice person.
Bob was supposed to be at the party with another girl, Tricia, also a student at Alabama; though she had made it down to New Orleans, she was sick and didn’t come out.
Another lucky break that seems less like luck and more like destiny.
The two girls started talking to Bob’s group of friends. Gina thought Bob looked like Barry Williams of The Brady Bunch fame, curly mop of hair and all; Barry Williams had just starred in Grease, and Gina went to see him three times and even got his autograph. Now, a Barry Williams lookalike was standing right in front of her, and he had an irresistible Southern accent. (In fact, later on, she so loved his accent that she would tape record their phone conversations so she could hear his voice whenever she wanted.)
They agreed to meet up the next night, January 1, 1978, at the famous New Orleans haunt Pat O’Brien’s. Gina considers this she and Bob’s first and, really, only date, since their forthcoming long distance courtship didn’t give them the opportunity to date like a couple living in the same city could. Gina, her friend Poody – yes, that’s her real nickname – met Bob and one of his fraternity brothers there. It was a great night. They planned to meet the next day at halftime of the Sugar Bowl.
***
The next day, January 2, was the main event – the Sugar Bowl, a matchup between 10-1 Alabama and 9-2 Ohio State. It was a coaching matchup from Heaven – Bear Bryant for the Crimson Tide, and Woody Hayes for the Buckeyes, who were, at the time, the winningest active coaches.
Nobody scored in the first quarter. By halftime, Alabama was up 13-0 after a Tony Nathan touchdown run and a Jeff Rutledge touchdown pass to Bruce Bolton. Bob and Gina met up at halftime, but the second half didn’t get much better for the Buckeyes – they did put points on the board, but not until early in the fourth quarter with a Rod Gerald pass to Jim Harrell. The Buckeyes went for two, but failed – it was far too late anyway. The Tide won 35-6.
There were 76,811 people in attendance that day. But for Bob and also for Gina, only one person mattered.
***
After the game, Gina and Poody had several hours to kill before they had to head to the airport. Still reeling from the loss, the other Ohio State fans just sat in the hotel lobby. Gina and Poody weren’t going to waste their last hours in New Orleans sulking, so they headed back to Pat O’Brien’s.
When they showed up at Pat O’Brien’s, the girls ran into some of Bob’s fraternity brothers. One of Bob’s friends covered for him and said he had twisted his ankle and was back at the hotel.
Then Bob walked in – with an ankle that was clearly not twisted – and with Tricia, who had finally gotten well. Gina, not knowing the backstory, assumed the girl was someone Bob had just met.
Gina wouldn’t talk to him. It was Poody that gave Bob Gina’s number.
614-878-5069.
Again, a coincidence that maybe wasn’t a coincidence at all – of all places, Bob and Gina ran into each other again. They had not planned to see one another after the game – Gina had a flight to catch. Maybe it was just a fun meetup in New Orleans and that was it. But Bob had Gina’s phone number now.
The rest, as they say, is history.
***
A week later, life was settling back in to normalcy for both Bob and Gina. Gina was taken by the guy with the accent who looked like Barry Williams and told her mom about him; her mom said he’d never call. A week after getting home from New Orleans, the phone rang. It was Bob.
Now, even I at 32 am old enough to remember having to buy prepaid phone cards to call my friends long distance so my family’s phone bill wouldn’t be through the roof. Trust me, as an experienced veteran of more than one long distance relationship, they are hard to make work in 2018; I can’t imagine how tough it would have been in 1978, 40 years ago. No texting. No FaceTime. No E-mails. Nothing but once a week phone calls and the occasional letter to each other. It must have been torture.
Bob, whose career is in software engineering, had an interview in Ann Arbor, Michigan in February. Ann Arbor to Columbus is a hair over three hours away; not a hop, skip, and a jump, but certainly closer than Tuscaloosa to Columbus. Bob sent flowers on Valentine’s Day 1978 and came to visit Gina the day after Valentine’s Day, where he met her family. He ended up taking the job in Ann Arbor, which one would think would have meant seeing each other all the time and exclusivity – but, nope. The two barely saw each other while Bob was in Ann Arbor. In fact, Bob was dating someone from Alabama, Libby, and Gina was dating other people too.
The patience of these two – the delayed gratification – is seriously remarkable to me. Maybe it speaks to how I (despite my unwillingness to admit it) actually am a millennial and am a part of the instant gratification, I-want-it-now generation. I mean, even Bob said over queso and Cokes at the Mexican restaurant we met at that he wouldn’t recommend their method of courtship. It probably wouldn’t even work in 2018, sadly. But man, the foundation they were building sure built a beautiful relationship. And maybe that’s part of the secret.
***
Bob was in Ann Arbor for nine months before he returned home to Alabama. He and Libby broke up, and he and Gina continued to send letters and have weekly phone chats. He’d come up to Ohio to see her; she’d go down to Alabama to see him. Before they were married, the Wilsons never saw one another for more than a week at a time. This went on for nearly three years (can you feel how astounded I am at their patience)?
Gina was a student now at Ohio State studying dietetics. It was December 1980. Gina went down to Tuscaloosa for a visit shortly before Christmas. After Gina returned home to Columbus, Bob got her a poinsettia for the impending holiday; it was huge, Gina said. She also remembers thinking “Bob can’t afford this.”
“Would you ever move away from your family?” he asked around this time.
She said she would. And the wheels began turning.
***
614-878-5069.
Bob dialed Gina’s number on January 3, 1981. Three years and one day after the 1978 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
It would be a phone call that would change both of their lives. Because during that three hour phone call, Bob proposed.
“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said. “I want to marry you.”
Bob knew there was a chance she could say no. In fact, he was ready for the no. But she said yes.
The ring came later. Later than Gina would have liked, actually. When Bob came up in February – over a month after the proposal – he didn’t have the ring. One of his friends owned a jewelry store and Bob was getting the ring there, but the ring was too yellow. In yet another example of Gina’s enormous amount of patience, she didn’t get her ring until spring break, over two months post-proposal.
Gina had only seen Bob on vacation – when either he or she was out of their normal, every day element. But she never felt scared. She never felt jittery. She had peace. It was right. It helped that her parents were very fond of Bob. And that she was very fond of him, too.
Bob was not Catholic; Gina was, and it was a bedrock of her life. At pre-marital counseling, Bob and Gina had to take a compatibility test, which asked all of the questions couples should talk about before marriage – what about the finances? What about religion? The finance questions were easy – hell, they didn’t have any money. Bob took so long on the compatibility test that the priest jokingly became concerned. And, even though she detested hot weather, Gina married Bob on July 25, 1981 and moved, sight unseen, to their new apartment in Tuscaloosa, a place where in late July is a few degrees cooler than hell itself. They married in Ohio and honeymooned in Jamaica and then settled in Tuscaloosa, where Gina was homesick for a while – and who could blame her? At just 22 when she married (Bob was 25), Gina was living in a new state, going to a new school – she transferred from Ohio State to Alabama to finish her bachelor’s degree – and, oh yeah, newly married. She had met some ladies at a bridal tea thrown in her honor before they got married, but really, she didn’t have any close friends yet, and definitely didn’t have her three sisters there. Gina’s parents didn’t think Bob’s business would make it and expected the newly minted Wilsons to move to Columbus within a couple of years.
Bob and Gina still live in Tuscaloosa today.
***
The Wilsons celebrated 37 years of marriage in July. So many marriages don’t make it that far. What is their secret, I asked?
I’ve mentioned before that faith is the cornerstone of Gina’s life. She told me that marriage takes three – and in their marriage it’s Bob, Gina, and God. They take their marriage day by day and pepper it with prayer. Something that was extremely attractive to Bob during he and Gina’s courtship was her faith, he said. Bob didn’t go to church regularly growing up and was deeply attracted to Gina’s faith. It was something he was looking for in a wife. He thought back then, if we have kids someday, it’ll give them the opportunity to grow up in a home full of faith.
When they got married, Bob attended church regularly with Gina. It took him a while, but a couple of years ago Bob finally converted to Catholicism. Gina thought the surprise Bob was cooking up was getting her a puppy; instead, it was getting baptized into the faith. It meant everything to Gina.
The two of them are pretty much generally happy people, Bob said; their secret, he said, is to be happy, to never take the other for granted, and to live in the moment and be present.
Gina nodded her head.
“The years go faster and faster,” she said, sipping on her water. “Why waste any time being unhappy?”
This isn’t to say that their 38 years of marriage have been perfect. Gina got her master’s degree in May 1988; the next month, she was pregnant with their only child, a daughter, Rachel, who was born in March 1989. Gina worked part-time after Rachel was born, and Bob worked – well, Bob worked all the time. Too much. That was a struggle in their marriage, and there were others. But Gina said this: “You make compromises,” she said. “I just try to treat Bob like it’s the first time I’ve seen him or the last time I’m going to see him. I don’t take him for granted.”
Bob smiled across the table at Gina, his wife of 38 years, the woman who from the moment he met her said she seemed like a really nice person.
“I think you just need to marry a good person, when it’s all said and done,” he said.