Thruway to romance at Exit 19

New York – He was a toll booth operator, she was a soprano who sang in Carnegie Hall. Their eyes met at Exit 19 of the New York State Thruway when he charged her 35 cents.

The romance that followed seems even less plausible than the plot of Aida.

Sonya Baker was driving to Manhattan when she stopped at the booth of Michael Fazio, a bearded gentleman nine years her senior whose experience of opera was limited to the tenor performances of God Bless America in the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium.

She thought he was ‘‘desperately cute’’.

In the weeks that followed, they would exchange a few words as she handed him her fare and he raised the barrier to let her pass.

‘‘He was someone who liked his job,’’ she said yesterday. ‘‘It felt really easy. It was mostly ‘What are you up to today? Where are you headed?’ There are so many people that really aren’t very friendly on the thruway that this stood out.’’

However, true love and, indeed, traffic doth seldom run smooth. Their snatched conversations, as vehicles backed up, came to an abrupt end. Though Fazio looked for her white Toyota Corolla, l he would not see her again for six months. Yet years later, they are happily married and living in Kentucky, where she is a music professor and dean of students at Murray State College, and he runs an activity centre at a nursing home. The tale of their courtship at Exit 19 emerged during thousands of interviews undertaken by Storycorps, a non-profit organisation that records oral histories and archives them at the Library of Congress.

The cause of their sudden parting seems to have been a change in Fazio’s hours. ‘‘It turned out he had been working midnight shifts,’’ Baker, 46, said yesterday.

After that, ‘‘maybe I wasn’t coming through his lane’’, she said. ‘‘That’s when he said, ‘Well, I will put a cone in front of my lane; it will be like putting a candle in the window’.’’

Baker, who had to drive into Manhattan for auditions, began looking for reasons to pass through Exit 19. ‘‘I . . . almost crashed on several occasions, I’m sure, trying to cross several lanes,’’ she said.

She asked him what he would do for her if he forgot to put the cone out. ‘‘You name it,’’ he said.

She said he should take her out to dinner. ‘‘I gave him my phone number,’’ she said. ‘‘I drove away thinking, ‘I can’t believe I just gave the toll booth man my number’.’’

They went to see the film Cool Runnings, the story of the first Jamaican bobsled team. She took him to see Carmen, and accompanied him to a Yankees game.

She had given him her number just in time. A short while after she had to move to New Jersey. ‘‘I might not have seen him again,’’ she said.