Ann and Richard Hazlett
Aug. 15, 1953
Ann: We met at J.L. Long Junior High. Richard was the new boy. We were in English class, and I was sitting up toward the front, and at the back of the room I heard someone calling like a crow. It was the new boy, and I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. On Saturdays, everyone went to the Lakewood Theater, and I went with my friend, and he was sitting with a friend of his on the row behind me. I put my hand behind my head on the seat, and he put his hand on top of mine. These were more innocent times back then, and I’m telling you, that was big.
Richard: Every boy I knew was scared of girls to start with.
Ann: I sat there with my hand behind my head on the back of the seat through five cartoons, a serial and a double feature. I didn’t dare move my hand for fear I was rejecting him. We started dating soon after. I probably was 14, and he was 15. We broke up one time in high school for a few months because my mother made me.
Richard: “How are you going to know how he compares?” That’s what her mother said. It was miserable. I didn’t date anybody during that period, or ever after.
Ann: This was back during the days when Lakewood Country Club had formal teenage dances. I was with somebody else, and Richard came up to me, and I said, “I need a cup of punch,” and he said, “Well, I’ll get it for you if you’ll go steady with me again,” and I said, “I’m very thirsty.” And then we got back together and have been ever since.
Richard: We have always felt like we loved each other enough to be able to hang on until we’ve ironed out whatever the problem was. Both her parents and my parents only had one spouse. I’d be sitting with my parents as a kid in a restaurant, and a woman or a man that they knew would come to the booth to talk or say hello, and I remember several times he would leave and my mother or my dad would whisper, “You know, he’s in a divorce.” I got to eventually realize that that was bad enough not to say out loud.
Ann: I just think you don’t give up. You can get so angry at someone, but anger goes away, and if you have walked out the door when you’re angry, and then that anger passes, then where are you? Something that makes you furious one day is not such a big deal another day, so it’s too bad if you cut off your nose to spite your face, so to speak.
Richard: Over the years, we’ve enjoyed a great deal, having season tickets to the theater, to the symphony, and for a while to the opera. Ann and I are also very lucky in that we are both avid readers, and that helps a whole lot to have something we can enjoy together.
Ann: It was great, good luck that, by and large, we enjoy the same things. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve grown alike … I can’t explain that because when you are 14 years old, you certainly don’t have any idea what you are doing. The neat thing, I think, about longevity is that you go through periods, and everything is just going along, and then something happens, and you kind of fall in love again, and you have a really neat exciting period before the humdrum starts again. I think that happens periodically during a marriage, and I think it’s really fun when you look forward to the evenings — sitting down together and having a drink: It’s special. And I don’t know when it’s ever going to quit being special.
Lucille and Gene Tilley
Nov. 9, 1940
Lucille: The first time I saw him was on the tennis court at Garrett Park, and he had a big hole in his britches in his knee, so I remembered that, but I didn’t meet him then. His friend, who was named …
Gene: … Woodrow Wilson — not the president, though — he took us dancing over in Fort Worth out on the lake.
Lucille: Woodrow wanted to meet the girls who were playing on the other court, so he called me for a date, and he wanted me to get his friend, Gene Tilley, a date with a friend of mine, so I did. We had a good evening. Tilley liked dancing with me, I guess, but he wasn’t my date. I had a number of dates with Woodrow that summer, but then he left. He went back to Akron, Ohio, (he and Tilley worked for Goodyear) and Tilley got my phone number from him, and that’s what started it. Our first date was a banquet at Gaston Avenue Baptist Church.
Gene: Yeah, I remember that. That was good food, wasn’t it?
Lucille: I don’t remember the food. He left that fall and went to Akron for a year.
Gene: Then I talked the people up there into sending me back to Dallas. I said, “I’m going back to Texas. I’ve got a girl down there,” and they sent me back.
Lucille: He came in October, and we married in November. He had come back twice during that year. His mother would say he came to see her, but I think he came to see me. Our wedding was very simple; it was at the pastor’s house.
Gene: We didn’t have a big wedding
Lucille: You know how many were present, including the pastor and his wife? 13.
Gene: He did a good job, though. We’re still together.
Lucille: Tilley was a sweet boy.
Gene: I was.
Lucille: You know you can go with some boys, and you know what they’re like. Tilley was a gentleman. He was different. And he didn’t drink, and he didn’t smoke, and that was an asset.
Gene: I didn’t think I could do any better, so I just stayed. (laughs)
Lucille: During the war, he got drafted, and he went into the service and was over there 18 months after we were married. 38096751. That’s his dog tag number. When you write it every day … (laughs). Tilley asks me what my social security number is, and I say, ‘I don’t know, but I know 38096751.’
Gene: We spent so much time not together, so once we did get together …
Lucille: It was pretty important, wasn’t it.
Gene: I didn’t think I could do any better, so I just stayed.
Lucille: She heard you the first time.
Gene: And she’s a good cook.
Lucille: And after you have children, too, if you’re the right kind of parents you want your children to be the right kind of people, and I think families hold people together, families and faith and love. It’s a 50-50 thing — give a little and take a little. I think we’ve both been maybe easy to live with; neither one of us is hot-tempered.
Gene: I don’t know of any serious disagreements we’ve had that ever amounted to anything. She’s usually right on most things, so I agree with her, that way I evade as many arguments as possible.
Lucille: Our children never saw us fuss and scream and holler at each other like some couples do, and they never heard my husband, their father, curse, and these are things that are important in the life of a child. Our oldest daughter, she was a stinker, and when she was a teenager, she said, “Mother, I’ve never seen daddy throw you back in his arms and love you.” (laughs) She was such a romantic little girl. We just thought it was funny.
Vel and Connie Hawes
June 1, 1958
Vel: We went to Sunset High School. Five girls there gave a dance, and after the dance we went Red Bryan’s in Oak Cliff, and we sat at this booth, and I sat next to her. We talked nonstop the whole time. As soon as I got home that night, I called her and set a date for the next Saturday. After two or three dates, we started going steady.
Connie: He had a blue ’52 Chevy convertible with blue suede shoes. And he wore his jeans with a blue and white-checkered shirt.
Vel: I just thought she was cute as hell. And here we are. Happily ever after with a few bumps along the way, like four of them.
Connie: The first time we went to White Rock Lake to “neck,” we went with another couple who would later be our best man and maid of honor, and the boys spread out the blanket, and I said, “I’m not getting out of that car. I’m not getting on that blanket.” I keep telling Vel, after having four kids, that’s why I didn’t want to get on that blanket.
Vel: A lot of our friends at Sunset got married. That was just kind of the way you did it — you met somebody in high school and got married and lived happily ever after. We actually went together for six years. Then A&M was all male, all military, and the architecture degree was five years, so we got married my fifth year.
Connie: I went to North Texas for college, but I didn’t want to go to school; all I wanted to do was get married. I spent so much time in College Station that I flunked out.
Vel: We managed most of the time we raised kids for Connie to be at home. She had some part-time jobs just to keep food on the table. Architects don’t make a lot of money, and I had a great, successful career, but it took a long time to get going.
Connie: There came a point that his career was beginning to build, and then I felt all of our friends had gone on and gotten college degrees, and all I really had were those kids I was staying home with. It was that time when women’s lib was taking off, and it wasn’t fashionable to stay home, so we had a really rough time. I felt insecure in social situations.
Vel: She got pretty low, and one day she just decided, I’m going back to school.
Connie: I earned a degree in rehabilitation counseling at UT Southwestern in the School of Allied Health, then I went to work, and later went back and got my master’s. It was something I needed to prove to myself.
Vel: The tagline here is I’ve been married to two women in my lifetime, and they’ve both been the same one.
Connie: I didn’t even have to change my hair color.
Vel: It’s really been since the last kid left the house that we’ve had a chance to rekindle what we love about each other. We’ve had a second life. A lot of people worry, “What are we going to do?” and it’s been great. Early on, I think if we hadn’t had a lot of commitment and a lot of strength, we would have said to hell with it. But the payoff is there, and that’s what I would say to any young person.
Connie: There were a lot of times we could have thrown in the towel. I think we were lucky to grow up in the ’50s. That era had a lot of stick-to-it-ness. Out of our friends in the class of ’54 and ’55, there were very few divorces that met in high school.
Vel: We went back to what was Red Bryan’s about three years ago. It’s a Mexican restaurant now — El Rachito’s(IS THIS RIGHT OR IS IT RANCHITO?). We sat at the table across from the very booth we met in. There was a family there, and it was obvious that the young couple with the family was getting married. After a couple of margaritas, Connie went over and said, “This booth has good karma. We got married after sitting in this booth.” Next thing you know, we owned the restaurant. They were yelling: “Connie! Connie!”
Tom and Lula Maye Walsh
May 20, 1956
Tom: We met when I was shipped to the Pantex Plant outside of Amarillo.
Lula Maye: They made the H-bomb and the A-bomb. He was shipped from Korea there, and I was working as secretary to the personnel manager.
Tom: I worked with the Army, and there were only two military personnel in that plant. The rest were civilians.
Lula Maye: There were 13 available women for every available man in the plant, and then here came him. My boss told me, ‘Why don’t you go over and meet that captain?’ And at the time, I said, “No, if he wants to meet me, he can come over here. I’ll wait around until he makes a fool out of himself.”
Tom: So I went in there and introduced myself.
Lula Maye: The first thing you know, we had a date, and two and a half weeks later, he proposed to me.
Tom: Well, if you find money on the curb, you’re not going to let it go, are you? You’re going to pick it up. I got my own A-bomb.
Lula Maye: I was dating somebody else, and he was afraid I’d get away. But we didn’t get married for another two years. We had two weddings.
Tom: We had a civil wedding, what they call “the blessing of the marriage,” because the Catholic Church wouldn’t honor our wedding.
Lula Maye: I had been married before, so it had to go all the way to Rome to be approved. After we got engaged, I went up to meet his parents, and I’m sure they weren’t necessarily enthralled with me because I also had a little girl, and I was a blonde hussy from Texas.
Tom: She was born in the Panhandle, and I was born in Ireland.
Lula Maye: His mother wanted him to marry a good ol’ Catholic Irish girl in Philadelphia, and he said, no, she was ugly as sin, and he didn’t want to marry her. And my mother didn’t care for Catholics. In those days, people were very prejudiced about things like that. But as Tom said many years later: “It was a good thing we didn’t live near my parents or yours, or we wouldn’t have stayed married.” When his mother saw that I was a pretty good wife and mother, she finally approved and brought us our wedding presents.
Tom: Those two lamps over there.
Lula Maye: It was about eight or nine years later. She took her time.
Tom: You see that picture behind me? That’s Lula Maye.
Lula Maye: I had that picture made and sent to him in ’69 when he was in Vietnam so he wouldn’t forget me.
Tom: Oh, I wouldn’t forget you.
Lula Maye: You never know. There were a lot of stray ones wandering around.
Tom: I never had an eye for another woman because I had the best. Whatever your feelings are when you first meet the person have to remain the same throughout because if it changes, it means your eyes are going in the wrong direction.
Lula Maye: My son-in-law said to me one time, “How did you know but what he wouldn’t be straying on you?” Well, I just always had faith in him that he wouldn’t, and I asked Tom not too long ago, “What if something happens to me? Who would you pick up next?” And he said, “No one.” And I said, “Not even to pick up the house?” And he said …
Tom: No.
Lula Maye: And I said, “We’ll see,” and he asked me, and I said, “I may live with someone, but I’ll never marry again.”
Tom: And I would never do that because it’s wrong.
Lula Maye: Before we go to bed at night we kiss each other and say we love each other. Sometimes he’ll say, “I don’t know if you really mean it now.”
Tom: But it is a good habit.
