Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 17, 1995 TAG: 9505170088
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Bob Hartman met Margie Gray at a bowling alley in Salem. She was a local girl who worked in a meat-packing plant. He was a freshman at Roanoke College, down from Hackensack, N.J., on a partial football scholarship.
"It was kinda love at first sight," he recalls. He walked her home from the bowling lanes and movies a few times. Then he summoned the nerve to ask her out on a date.
The two 18-year-olds were going to go out Jan. 20, 1942, after he finished his exams. He had it all planned: He'd lavish his meager cash reserves on dinner and a movie.
But then the letter came from his dad. The war was on, money was tight, and the family couldn't afford Bob's second-semester tuition.
Bob decided go home on the train that night. He had a friend give Margie a note explaining as best he could. He told her, "I sure hope that I will be able to come back to the `South' next fall, and maybe put a claim on that date I am missing."
He signed it "Best Wishes" and added, "P.S. I will write you sometime when I get home."
And write he did - more than 240 letters from Up North, from military bases around the country and from bomb-pocked tropical islands across the Pacific Ocean. She in turn wrote him hundreds of letters. Given the way the mails worked in the battle zone, sometimes they'd come to him in bunches of five, six, eight, even 10 at a time.
They didn't see each other for 21/2 years. By then, Margie Louise Gray was wearing an engagement ring - one that Bob's dad had bought with a money order Bob sent from the Pacific. They were married in Hackensack on June 27, 1944, while he was free on a 30-day pass from the air base in San Diego.
A half-century later, Margie and Bob Hartman still are married, and Margie has a steel strongbox where she's saved all his letters.
Even without their uncommon courtship, their epoch-spanning story is a bit of an exception these days. But you probably wouldn't be reading about their air-mail romance if Bob hadn't gotten it in his head to make up commemorative albums to give to their four children at their 50th anniversary celebration last summer.
At some point in the project - which included hand-typed duplicates of every missive he wrote - Bob lost one of the letters. It was dated June 1,1944, and it told Margie that he would soon be home on leave and was ready to make good on their yearlong engagement. "You'd like to be a June bride, wouldn't you?" Bob asked.
With so many letters, Bob never knew it was gone. It languished in the lost-and-found bin at the Roanoke County Library headquarters for more than a year - until it was featured last week in a story about things people lose at the library.
Margie picked up the newspaper that morning, saw the accompanying photo and recognized the handwriting on the envelope before she even read the name "Miss Margie Lou Gray." She let out a surprised gasp.
"What are you getting so excited about?" Bob asked.
"Look at this!" she said. "Look at this!"
Bob grabbed their copy of the commemorative album - which he had titled "From Parting to Partners" - and carried it down to the library. Just to prove that, yes, he was the guy who'd written the letter in question and, yes, he was the one who'd left it by the library copy machine.
Margie and Bob both are 72 now, enjoying their retirement in a home on a well-cultivated hillside in Southwest Roanoke County. They've been together long enough that, while they don't necessarily finish each other's sentences, they often finish each other's thoughts. One recent morning they sat in the wooden gazebo out back and reminisced about their romance and teased each other about the lost letter.
"Good thing I didn't know it was missing," Margie said with a wink.
"She'd have scalped me," Bob added with a sheepish smile.
Bob first saw Margie at the bowling alley on Main Street in Salem in the fall of 1941. He asked a friend to introduce them. They saw each other several times after that - Bob gave her a goodnight kiss on the cheek one night - but they never went out on a real date. Bob was overwhelmed with football and studies and, what's worse, he had no money.
He finally saved up enough - "dimes and nickels and quarters" - for their date. Then the letter came from his dad, a police lieutenant in Hackensack. Bob wrote a note telling her it was "essential that I get home as early as possible to secure a job in New York City."
"I was hurt," Margie recalls. "Not necessarily angry. Embarrassed."
"One of the college guys told me you looked like a million bucks," Bob adds. "He said I should have stayed here."
"He said you were a fool," Margie says.
He took the 6:40 p.m. train out of Salem and arrived home at 9 a.m. the next day.
He kept his promise to write, about three weeks later. He told her about his night-shift job, asked about her bowling scores and closed by saying he was "waiting anxiously for a few words from you."
She did write back, and their correspondence began. At first he signed his letters, "Regards." Later it was "Affectionately" and, by the fall of '42, "Lots of love and kisses."
By then he was in Marine boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. He thought he'd get a pass to visit Margie after basic training, but instead he was loaded on a train that took him across the country. In January 1943, Bob's unit was sent to Guadalcanal in the Pacific, the site of fierce dive-bombing raids by the Japanese.
Bob worked half-day shifts - 12 hours on, 12 hours off - driving a fuel truck at the island's airstrip. He wrote mostly during his time off during daylight. Some nights he wrote by candlelight.
Margie wrote him almost every day, sending him photos of herself, along with cartoons and jokes to liven up his day. She wrote of the weather and her friends in Salem and, later, in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a civilian employee of the Army Air Corps.
He finally popped the question on June 13, 1943: "I sure would like you for my own, and I'm hoping that you will say, YES. It may seem a little strange to you, what with my being way out here, but I've loved you ever since I met you, and as time goes by, whether I'm near you or nine thousand miles away, that feeling doesn't change."
He didn't get her answer until July 31.
Her letter broke up the card game he was in. "Today," he wrote back, "I am the happiest man and Marine in the whole world."
Bob was rotated stateside to an air base in San Diego, and on June 1, 1944, he wrote her telling he'd be free on a pass soon. He'd wanted to wait until his hitch in the Marines was over in 1946 to get married. But now he wrote: "Say, Margie, if when we meet again, we still feel that our love is strong and that we are meant for each other, let's get married, aye?"
Bob and Margie married in New Jersey on June 27. They spent their three-day honeymoon at The Park Central in New York City. The bill: $23.91 after the serviceman's $5 discount.
They'll celebrate their 51st anniversary in a few weeks. They moved to Roanoke County in 1981 after Bob retired from his job as a security supervisor at New Jersey Bell. They have a good life, lots of hobbies and friends - and lots of memories.
"Want to burn these things with the mortgage?" Bob asks, motioning to the metal box stuffed with love letters.
"No," Margie says. "I've held onto 'em all these years."
In one letter several months after he started writing, Bob made a confession about the night he stood her up: "I'll tell you a little secret - just between you and me and my pen. I went home that night because my Dad asked me to come home soon - just not that soon - but I went because I had just enough money for train fare to get home on. I knew that if I went out with you - I would spend it all because I wanted to show you a good time." After he bought his train ticket, he recalls, he had 50 cents left for the bus home from the station.
Sitting with him under their gazebo 50 years later, Margie grins.
"Think I should believe that story?" she asks.
"You should, after 50 years," Bob says.
by CNB