‘Over time, I fell in love’
STAMFORD — Two senior couples in Stamford said they don’t have big plans for Valentine’s Day this year, but after being married for more than half a century, they seem content with simply spending the day together.
Leroy Bull, 77, said he and his wife, Diane, 78, might have food delivered for the holiday.
“With COVID, I’m afraid we’re not doing much,” Leroy said. “We’ll probably order in a nice meal.”
And Lila Croen, 90, said she isn’t expecting any grand gestures from her husband, Walter, 96.
“My husband is wonderful about big things, but he is not good about little things,” Lila said. “I think in the 69 years we’ve been married, about three or four times he’s given me something for Valentine’s Day — and it’s usually because somebody reminded him.”
“But you know what,” she added, “I don’t need him to tell me that he loves me on Valentine’s Day. He tells me that all the time.”
‘Over time, I fell in love’
Lila and Walter went on their first date in 1950. They were set up by their fathers, who had known one another through their work in the clothing industry. The two men hadn’t seen each other for years when they ended up seated together on a train ride from New York City to Westchester County. They shared pictures of their children and “decided that they should be matchmakers,” Lila said.
Walter’s father gave him Lila’s phone number — “but he didn’t want to respond to any matchmaking that his father did, so he stuck it in his drawer,” she said.
He soon changed his mind. During the summer of 1950, Walter took out the piece of paper and called.
“I guess he had nothing to do,” Lila said.
Lila wasn’t at home. But her mother, who was “very charming and loved to talk on the telephone,” chatted with Walter.
“And so he thought, ‘Well, if the mother is so nice, the daughter must be nice,’ ” Lila said.
Lila was studying at Syracuse University at the time. When she came home for Independence Day weekend, Walter called again and they went out that night.
“The first moment I saw her, I said to myself, ‘That’s the woman I’m going to marry,’ ” Walter said. “I just knew it. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did.”
“Well, that wasn’t true for me,” Lila said, laughing. “I thought he was nice. I thought he was definitely an improvement over some of the dates my father had fixed me up with. But I wasn’t thinking about getting married. I was only 20 years old.”
Lila still had one more semester to finish at Syracuse, so they only saw each other a couple times following their first date. After she graduated in January 1951, they began to date regularly while Lila attended graduate school.
“Walter would pick me up from graduate school and drive me home,” Lila said. “And over time, I fell in love. He was the nicest, most intelligent, kindest person I had met.”
“Wow, you never told me all that,” Walter said.
The couple had their first kiss in March 1951 — months after they first met.
“That sort of confirmed that this was a good match,” Lila said. “I know that wouldn’t happen today.”
Two months later, Walter proposed one night in Lila’s parents’ living room.
“It wasn’t one of these grand proposals that you read about — a ring is hidden or whatever,” Lila said. “It just came out naturally — maybe unexpectedly.”
Lila and Walter were married at a synagogue in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on a rainy day in September 1951. They had wanted their wedding to be small, but Lila’s mother had other plans.
“My parents had a very small wedding in a rabbi’s study,” Lila said. “So the wedding we had was the wedding my mother wanted for herself.”
Over five and a half years, Lila and Walter had four children. They eventually moved from New York City to Edgemont, N.Y., where they lived for
40 years.
“Going home from work, I always had the feeling: ‘I’m going where I really want to be,’ ” Walter said. “We loved our children, and we loved each other.”
They moved to Stamford in 2018 to be closer to their daughters, who live in the area. Walter and Lila have seven grandchildren and a great-grandson.
“Our life has not been without problems,” Lila said. “Nobody’s life is when you live as long as we have. We’ve had some health issues, some financial issues. But we weathered them.”
The key, she said, has been talking through their problems when they arise.
“I insisted that when we had problems we had to confront them and deal with them,” she said.
‘I didn’t think we would last one year’
Diane and Leroy were set up on a blind date by their best friends in 1962. She was a student at Pennsylvania State University, and he was a “townie.”
“She accepted going out on a date with only 30 minutes before the curfew for her dorm,” Leroy said.
They dated for about three years before they got married. When he proposed, Leroy “made a humorous mistake.”
“I called her father and asked him for permission to marry his daughter,” he said. “And when he got done laughing — which was five minutes — he said, ‘You have to ask her, not me. She’ll make up her own mind.’ ”
“He was white as a sheet,” said Diane, who was there when Leroy called her father.
Diane and Leroy were married in August 1965, on the top floor of a building in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia.
“I didn’t think we would last one year,” Diane said. “We were so different.”