USA TODAY International Edition
Ordinary people tell their extraordinary love stories
‘ All There Is’ gathers true tales of how remarkable romances came to be
When Ruben met Rachel, it was because of an errant e- mail. He lived in Waco, Texas. She lived in Bangkok. The e- mail triggered a romance.
When Scott met Isabel, it was New Year’s at a manhattan bar. He noticed the woman dressed up in what he calls “Ava Gardner gloves — elbow length, satiny.” She thought he was smart and funny, but to play it safe, she asked to see his ID.
And when Bobbi met Sandi, both were in the Women’s Army Corps at Fort Mcclellan, Ala. They kept their romance a secret to avoid being dishonorably discharged.
Love comes in all shapes and sizes and often, when it’s least expected. Need examples? Read the 37 interviews in a new book,
All There Is: Love Stories from Storycorps ( Penguin, $ 24.95), edited by Dave Isay and released in time for Valentine’s Day next Tuesday.
Storycorps, a national non- profit project affiliated with public radio, tapes interviews with ordinary people who often tell extraordinary stories about their lives. Three couples in the book talked to USA TODAY about how they met, why they shared their stories and what advice they can offer about romance.
Misfired e- mail sparks relationship
Ruben Paul Salazar wasn’t related to Rachel Perez Salazar. But in 2007, an e- mail sent to RP Salazar, meant for Rachel, arrived in Ruben’s inbox.
Ruben, who was 35 and working in a Waco computer lab, determined it was intended for Rachel, 40, at the Asian Development Bank. He relayed it to her, adding a P. S.: “How’s the weather there in Bangkok?”
Her reply — “Weather in Bangkok is lovely; it’s the best time to visit”— began a volley of e- mails, followed by phone calls.
He found her photo online and thought, “Wow, she’s really beautiful!” and says, “I felt like I could tell her anything.” He sent flowers with a note thanking her for “this newfound friendship.” Within six months, Rachel says, “I felt like I was falling in love with this guy who was 9,000 miles away.”
Rachel, who grew up in the Philippines, mentioned she might visit relatives in California. Ruben replied, “If you’re ever in Texas, come over.”
Despite some doubts, she did and stayed a week. One night on the dance floor, she told Ruben, “You’re the sweetest guy I’ve ever met.”
On bended knee, he asked her to marry him.
In November 2007 — 10 months after the errant e- mail — she did. Three years later, when Storycorps came to Waco, they interviewed each other.
Now 45, she says the tape of that interview, which Storycorps turned into an animated video, is a “nice addition” to their “box of memories,” a collection of e- mails and letters.
“Life is full of surprises,” she adds. “You never know what’s coming, but be prepared to grasp it.”
Ruben, 40, advises any couple, “Be really honest with each other, so there are no surprises when you finally do get married.”
She identified true love
When he was 31, Scott Wall, a photographer in New York, thought Isabel Sobozinsky, then 32, an auditor in San Francisco, looked “ravishing” at a Manhattan bar just after midnight on Jan. 1, 1992.
He recalls thinking, “I’d better move quickly.” She says she liked his smile and “he seemed like he could be intelligent.” But because she had been warned that Manhattan is “so big and scary,” she asked to see his identification.
They talked all night. After she returned to San Francisco, they kept in touch through letters and cassette tapes.
“There was no e- mail, no cellphones then,” he says, “so I would send her a tape with me on one side and say, ‘ The other side is for you to record something for me.’ ”
He sent small gifts, including his grandmother’s toaster — “all I could afford” — with a note: “I hope some day to be there with you when you toast my English muffins for me.”
When Scott’s father was dying of lung cancer in Buffalo, Isabel came to visit and meet his family, which he says “was a brave and wonderful thing to do.”
In the summer of 1992, he moved to San Francisco to be with her, but seven years passed before a friend of Isabel’s said to him, “Girlfriends don’t want to be girlfriends forever.”
They got married in 2000 and recorded their interview with Storycorps on Valentine’s Day 2011. She calls it “a gift of the heart to each other.”
They don’t have children, but at 51, Scott advises other couples: “Remember why you need each other.” Isabel, 53, says, “Never go to bed angry. Always remember what made you fall in love. Remember the song you played at your wedding.”
Theirs was It Had to Be You.
A secret love, now in the open
At 19, Bobbi Whitacre and Sandi Cote had joined the Women’s Army Corps — “patriotic idiots,” as Bobbi says now. It was 1968, and one night they were watching a TV special of Bob Hope entertaining the troops in Vietnam, singing
Thanks for the Memory.
Bobbi says: “I looked at Sandi. She looked at me, and we both knew.”
Sandi says, “We decided to make our own memories.”
At Fort Mcclellan, they kept their romance a secret, but on a three- day pass to Atlanta, in a “cheesy little motel,” as Bobbi puts it, they performed their own marriage ceremony using a Gideon’s Bible.
A year later, they left the Army, although Sandi says, “Bobbi wanted a military career.”
“I wanted you more,” Bobbi adds.
Bobbi became a management analyst with the federal government; Sandi became a homemaker. ( In 1980, they adopted Sandi’s nephew, who was then 15.) They lived in Bowling Green, Ohio, Washington and in Georgia Center, Vt. In 2000, when Vermont approved same- sex civil unions, they combined their names, becoming Bobbi and Sandi Cote- Whitacre.
Their civil- union ceremony was in the backyard of Bobbi’s mother, who had once been embarrassed that her daughter was gay but now insisted on walking her down the aisle. Bobbi says: “I still wasn’t totally happy with something less than marriage. That’s the way I was brought up. You find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with and you get married.”
They finally did, officially, in 2004 when Massachusetts approved same- sex marriages.
Two years later, they recorded their story when Storycorps came to Burlington. Sandi wanted to combat “all the fear and misinformation about gays and lesbians. We’re just normal people happy to be in love with each other.”
At 64, Sandi, after 44 years with Bobbi, advises, “Always remember what it was about the person you fell in love with.”
Bobbi, also 64, adds, “And keep telling her why you love her.”
Heart- rending tragedies here, too
Not all the stories in the book end happily. One section, devoted to interviews about “love lost,” includes Beverly Eckert.
In 2006, she recorded memories of her husband, Sean Rooney, a vice president at Aon Corp., who was 50 when he died in the terrorist attack at the World Trade Center. She recounted their final phone call: “He told me he was on the 105th floor, and I knew right away that Sean was never coming home.”
She said he remained calm, and talked about “all the happiness we shared.”
She told him that she wanted to be there with him and die with him, “but he said no. He wanted me to live a full life.”
At the end, she heard what sounded like an avalanche: “I heard Sean gasp once . . . . I called his name into the phone over and over. Then I just sat there huddled on the floor of our living room just holding the phone to my heart.”
She ended that interview saying her last phone call with Sean “traumatized me to the core of my being, but it was also a gift. My last memory that I have of Sean isn’t about pain or fear, but it’s about bravery and selflessness and most of all, about love.”
On Feb. 12, 2009, Beverly was flying to Buffalo, to the high school where she and Sean met at a dance when they were 16. She was scheduled to present a scholarship named after Sean and to mark what would have been his 58th birthday.
Five miles short of the runway, the plane crashed. Beverly, 57, died, along with 49 others.
From her home in suburban Buffalo, her older sister, Karen Eckert, tells USA TODAY that Beverly “would be so pleased to be in a book of love stories. She always wanted to hold on to the love she had, not just what she lost. She talked about living ‘ a life that is changed, but not over.’ She wanted to remind others to appreciate the love in their lives.”
“Life is full of surprises. You never know what’s coming, but be prepared to grasp it.”
— Rachel Perez Salazar