After online match, found love at 78
After a busy life of work and raising her children, Jo Ann Mullen could have focused on grandkids, travel, her wide circle of friends and the Hallmark Channel, on which, as she liked to say, “No one dies, no one gets hurt, and there’s always a happy ending.”
Having been divorced and widowed, she liked to travel, dress nicely, go to the theater and keep up with current events.
Some of her children’s friends referred to her as “The Duchess,” but she wasn’t some prim grandmother. She enjoyed her evening splash of “Nonny Water” — vodka.
After she died in January at 85, her children found preprinted notes in her car — with a few dashes in place of the missing letters — that she apparently kept for placing under the windshield wipers of bad drivers.
“Jesus loves you,” the notes said. “But everyone else thinks you are an a—h---.”
At the urging of friends, she joined a senior singles website at 77.
Still, her first date with David J. Regner, then 81, could have been their last. After connecting online, they agreed to meet at a restaurant in August 2012. She got lost and arrived late.
“The only reason he was still there is he literally fell asleep on a bench outside the restaurant waiting for me,” she later recalled.
After she woke up the former state lawmaker, they talked for hours.
“I just thoroughly enjoyed the man’s personality,” she said. “He was just a lot of fun.”
While attending a Roaring ’20s party at church, “They spent the whole night dancing with each other. It was like they were the only two people in the room,” said her daughter Michelle Stewart Walsh. “He spent a good year trying to talk her into marrying him.”
Fourteen months after they met, she said yes.
“She called and said, ‘What are you doing tomorrow? Can you come to a wedding?’ ” her daughter said.
On Oct. 8, 2012, the bride-to-be pushed her beloved’s wheelchair up to the priest who married them at Rosewood Care Center in Inverness, where he was recuperating after treatment for an aggressive skin cancer.
Her maid of honor, Judy Fishman, gave her a garter.
“He insisted on removing it with his teeth at the ceremony,” Mrs. Regner later said. “I was laughing so much I don’t think I said anything.”
A week later, she wound up in a separate wing at Rosewood for rehab with a broken ankle.
Eventually, they moved to a shared suite at the Garlands of Barrington retirement community. They had 16 months together before he died in December 2013.
“If only we’d met before,” they’d say. Young Jo Ann grew up in Greeley, Colorado, the daughter of Jake and Dorothy Cook. Her father was a plumber. Her mother took care of the business side. After high school, she moved to Denver for college.
“She wanted more out of life than what she believed Greeley could offer her,” her daughter said.
Later, able to type 97 words a minutes, she became an administrative assistant and worked for the National School Boards Association and for Apeco, a photocopier company.
In Denver, she met her first husband, Robert J. Stewart. He became an Episcopal minister, and they moved around for his church assignments, including what was known as the “Timberline Circuit” — doing multiple services on Sundays at three Colorado churches in Breckenridge, Leadville and Buena Vista. They also lived for a time in Kansas and the Chicago area. They divorced in the early 1970s.
In 1975, she married Bernard N. Mullen, who operated the Case Group construction company. He died in 1998.
Her son Michael remembers how indomitable she seemed when she’d blast Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” or the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child” while cleaning the house.
“When I was a kid, I thought my mother was Mary Tyler Moore,” he said. “She looked like her. I saw her as being strong and out on her own.”
A skilled seamstress, she once made an ornate christening gown for her granddaughter Nicole Walsh that was a reproduction of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s baptismal gown, her daughter said.
And Walsh said, “Any animal that met my mother would become my mother’s pet.”
In his eulogy, her son Mark said anyone who visits her cremation urn should “leave Nonny Water, photos of grandchildren and sculptures of frogs.”
Mrs. Regner was always elegant, even getting medical tests.
“I remember wheeling her through the hospital,” Walsh said. “Here’s my mom in her wheelchair, with her collar popped.”
In addition to her three children and granddaughter Nicole Walsh, Mrs. Regner is survived by grandchildren Anna Gustafson, Emelyn Walsh, Mina Stewart and stepgrandchild Jennifer Ryder.
Relatives said she told them on her deathbed, “Don’t worry about me. I’m brand new.”