#5 Liz

We’ve all heard stories about love at first sight. Let me tell you mine.

It was a Thursday night at Cal which was our weekly drinking night. Spring 1972. We had all gathered at our favorite watering hole Sy’s just off Telegraph Ave. My best friend Bill and I were walking back to SAE after another heavy night of drinking when I asked him if he was still up for another adventure. He was interested so I pointed to the girl’s dorm across the street and said let’s go meet some girls. Well of course the front door was locked so we had to come up with another way to get in.

I’ve told this story so many times over the years that I am not sure what part is fact vs. creative fiction. But here’s my story as best I can remember it. I found a tree close to the fire escape and thought we might be able to climb it and work our way over to the fire escape. And that’s what we did. I went first, Bill followed. It took a few floors, but we finally found one where the outside door was not locked. There was quite a bit of noise coming from one of the lower floors, so we began to work our way down to the second floor.

We crashed the party that had taken over most of the floor. We later learned that one of the girls had just been selected as a Cal pom-pom girl and they were all celebrating her success. We didn’t know a soul there.

Bill was much more aggressive than I was when it came to meeting girls. He had already found his pick for the night and was sitting next to her before I had fully surveyed the crowd and thought about my next moves. And then I spotted her sitting down on the floor, sipping champagne from a plastic cup.

To say she was beautiful was an understatement. Long brown hair. European features. Gorgeous figure. Tight blue jeans. Killer eyes. Beautiful smile. She had it all. Way above my pay grade. I had no chance.

But remember I had been drinking all night, so I probably wasn’t thinking very clearly. I simply went up to her, sat down, and said hi, my name is John. We didn’t have a long conversation, but long enough for me to learn her name was Liz and that she was a freshman from Alameda. On the way out of the dorm, I scanned the list of names in the lobby and got her telephone extension #. That’s all I needed.

The next day, after sobering up and realizing that I had just met the most beautiful woman of my life, I called her dorm and surprisingly she picked up. I reminded her that we had met briefly the night before and that I was calling to ask her out to the horse races on Saturday at Golden Gate Fields. I added that I had a Triumph Spitfire convertible to take us there. She hesitated for a moment, and I thought I was about to get shut-down. But I was wrong. She surprised me by saying that she would go and asked what time I was planning to pick her up.

We had a fun time at the races and went out to dinner afterwords. It was only after I was dropping her off at the dorm that she dropped the bomb shell on me. She said she couldn’t go out with me anymore because she had a boyfriend. WTF?

Fast forward 53+ years. We celebrate our 50th anniversary in October 2025. There have been a lot of ups and downs over the years including a divorce in 1990 and remarriage in 1993. I could probably write an entire book about our relationship.

But at some future date, I will first explain how we re-met in the Fall of 1972 and dealt with the boyfriend problem. Until then. JW.