How we met

My Michigan Alumni group teased me this morning by showing in anticipation of Valentine’s day pictures and stories of alums who had met at Michigan, asking for more stories. The latter proved to be a dead end. Maybe they’d had enough. I still went to their Facebook page and posted our story, after composing it. It’s a happy one and has to be told somewhere. We always enjoy retelling it. Here it is:

It was winter of ’84.  Kathy, daughter of UM alums, had come for grad school 3 years earlier, assistant coached the women’s swimming team, but was now hunkering down to her PhD work.   I’d arrived the previous summer, a ’74 grad with a ’75 masters, happy to be back in Ann Arbor.  Our mentors had something cooked up, unbeknownst to us.  Mine, skinny Tom Schnitzer presented Kathy as some one who also “I might like to know (ahem) socially.  She’s built a bit like a linebacker.”  Who knows what Tim White said to Kathy about me but we met in what passed for my office to discuss polymyositis (my thing) and exercise (her thing).  I managed to go on and on and she pretended to be captivated.  Maybe it was the white coat.  Soon we were at our first date at Bicycle Jims (in a building the U now controls and houses her office) then a birthday party for one of her mentor’s kids then a head over heels tumble leading to our marriage 30 months later

punctuated by an Ann Arbor house purchase (where we still live).  We remain all things Michigan, proud possessors of season tickets to both football and basketball.  I’ve hung them up after 36 years in the medical center, but Kathy continues to fight the good fight, pointing out the way to clear exposition to Kinesiology sophomores, happily watching former students perform in their chosen venues.  We aim to live and die in Ann Arbor.  Go blue!