This One Time, At Band Camp…Or How I Met My Wife

The wonderful Bre at TMI wrote yesterday about how she met her husband, Luis. At the end, she invited readers to post their own accounts of how they and their significant others first met. What follows is basically how I answered over there…

This one time, at band camp…

Uhh…don’t laugh. It was September 1972. I was about to start my third year at UCLA. I’d been part of the Solid Gold Sound of the UCLA Marching Band, Pride of the Southland, since my freshman year (1st clarinet). UCLA operates on the quarter system, and the fall quarter generally starts the last week of September/first week of October.

Of course, the football season starts right after Labor Day, so for three weeks in September, the band practices several times a week on the intramural fields just south of Drake Stadium, the on-campus track facility.

In 1972, the UCLA Marching Band finally became integrated. Oh, no, not that way. Remember, UCLA is Jackie Robinson’s alma mater! No…for the first time in history, the marching band would have girls! Not only that, but there would also be a corps of flag girls working with the band!

As it happened, I was also in Air Force ROTC (march, much? Sheesh.) We had a women’s auxiliary called Angel Flight, and I had dated one of the members of that group the previous year. While we were no longer dating, we were still good friends. Turns out Karen had been accepted into the Flag Corps, along with an incoming freshman pledge of her sorority.

So one afternoon during the first week of band camp (long before “This one time…” ever came to be, incidentally), Karen introduced me to Janet, a very attractive blonde. As it happened, I ended up dating one of her fellow pledges for a few weeks. She dumped me shortly before the annual Big Game against our crosstown rival, Southern California.

We ended up losing the USC game in the final minutes, and to add insult to injury, the USC band marched through our formation as we left the field at halftime. In this day and age, there probably would be a riot.

Anyway, after the game, a bunch of us ROTC guys and the girls from Angel Flight (Janet was a member by now) had a party at the apartment of one of our members. I was nursing a beer, and not in a good humor. Someone hollered at Janet to “Hey, smile!” Her answer was, “I’m not going to smile until Stevie B [my nickname, in this group] does.”

Pretty sure I fell in love with the girl right then and there. We started dating a bit, but since she didn’t want to appear to be chasing me, she invited another guy (a freshman, no less!) to her sorority’s “girl asks the guy” dance that year!

By the end of the school year, I had proposed to her, and in June 1974 we were married. Three sons, a granddaughter and 35 years later, here we are.