In this day of Internet dating, it's nice to know there is still

a wide range of ways that people meet each other and fall in

love. All are, in their own way, romantic for those involved, and

one common element in the telling of their tales is a certain glint in

the eye, a smile in the voice.

In this, the week before Valentine's Day, some true

love stories for your heart-warming pleasure.....

* * * *

Talk about romantic! In the first act of "La Boheme," Mimi

knocks on her neighbor Rodolpho's door seeking a match to re-light

her candle. Rodolpho, smitten by the girl's fragile beauty, slyly

blows out his own candle, and in the resulting darkness, the two

crawl on the floor searching for a lost key. Their hands touch and....

When Jeanie Rives of Peachtree City called The Citizen to tell

how her parents met, she described a scene that evoked Puccini's

opera.

World War II was winding down and Rives' Italian-American

father, a sergeant with the U.S. forces that took the beaches in

France, was stationed in Swansea, South Wales.

He was with his buddies at a Swansea pub on a spring

evening in 1945, when a local girl, leaving with her friends, realized she

had lost a brooch she had borrowed from her mother. The young

soldier had a flashlight and helped her search for the pin

her mother's favorite, naturally.

They found a swirly gold heart-shaped pin instead, but no

brooch. When she went home, the lass told the truth, and her mother was

understandably upset.

The chance encounter, however inspired by the talisman?

turned to romance for the young people, who married that

October. Jeanie was born the following year, two months after her mother

arrived in America "with thousands of wartime brides."

Although the brooch was never found, her mom has kept the

little heart all these years and, "as the oldest of her four daughters,"

Rives plans to keep it after her mother is gone.

* * * *

Beth Snipes, a Fayette County photographer whose work

appears often in The Citizen, says she got engaged without really

meaning to but adds quickly that she's had no regrets.

She met John when one of her girl friends, pulling out of a

gas station, hit another car, and began dating the Marine who was

driving it.

"I got to know him and his friends," Snipes said, and

when they were sent to Vietnam, John was there. "So John would

start adding messages on to Lee's letters he was real funny."

When John finished his tour in 'Nam and was transferred back

to the States, "I picked him up at the airport, and that's how we met."

But the engagement? What about the engagement?

"John thinks I'm just kidding, but this is true," Snipes said.

"He had a real deep Southern accent and one evening he

mumbled something real fast he was nervous and just to sort of keep

the conversation going, I nodded and said yes, and he got so excited

and started talking about, oh, this wonderful life we'd have

together. When I realized what I had agreed to, I wasn't so sure I wanted to

do that."

To hear Snipes talk, she couldn't make a graceful escape, and as

a result, has been married to John for 27 "really fun" years.

She and John have two grown daughters and a teen-age son.

* * * *

Another unlikely story with military links comes from a

Peachtree City couple who preferred to be unnamed. Call them Rudy

and Cela.

Cela is a Filipino. Rudy was stationed at Wallace Air Station,

a little radar site near San Fernando, on the west coast of Luzon

Island. He was taken with her long black hair and fell for her from the

first moment he saw her, getting drinking water at his base. She was 20.

Let Cela tell her story:

"I was a little bit off balance. My parents just went back to

their province [Isabela, on the east side of the mountains]. We

evacuated because where we used to live, there was a lot of guerilla

activity, a lot of killing. Because we had left everything we owned, we

don't have enough money or things to get income, and very little land,

so I decided to work as a housemaid in San Fernando.

"Rudy saw me and asked my friend [if I'd go out], and I said

no. He doesn't take no for an answer. He said, 'Oh, come on, let's

go,' and he picked me up and put me in the front of his truck. I could

understand everything they were saying, but he doesn't know I

could speak that good English.

"After about three dates, he says, 'How about getting

married?' Only not directly. He says, 'How long would the paperwork take

to finish for an American to get married here?'

"I heard it was about six months. He says, 'Six months, eh? Okay.'

"I wasn't sure if he had asked me to marry him or not, but

he brought the paperwork and asked me to sign something.

"Where I grew up, a lot of people I knew were engaged mostly

three years. The fiance goes abroad and then gets home and gets

married. There are still some arranged marriages. I came from a tribe that

has arranged marriages, but my parents didn't do that."

The lieutenant sent her home to see her parents. Her father is

a broom maker and was working on a grass broom when she arrived.

"He looked at me and said, 'Uh huh did you come home to

tell us you're getting married?'"

Despite her people's belief that it's bad luck for younger

siblings in a family to get married before the older ones, Cela's family

was "happy, yet sad," she said.

"The U.S. is so far off. They thought it was as far away as Manila

about 150 miles.

"I stay there for a week, helped with farm work. After that I

went back. Rudy was going crazy, thought I wouldn't be back.

We were married in San Fernando with friends [present], but my

parents didn't make it."

Never mind. Rudy went to see her family before he married

Cela. What was that meeting like?

"They hadn't seen much of Americans," Cela said. "The

last time was World War II. My Mom says, They all look the same

to me."

Cela's adjustment to modern American culture is another

story, but it's enough to say this improbable match-up produced an

honor-student son, nearly 16, and is going strong after nearly 20

years. Their faces still light up when they look at each other.

* * * *

People were meeting through printed personals long before

the advent of the Internet. A couple in their mid-60s had been

married about a year when they met a Citizen reporter among a group

of tourists stranded on an Alaska Marine Highway ferry in

Canada in 1997.

She was a widow, he a divorcee, and friends who saw how

lonely they were urged them to place ads in their respective

hometown newspapers.

Their reaction was the same: "At my age?" But just for

fun, they did, and eventually saw each other's ad. They met discreetly

at a restaurant, and in a few months, Frank and Ruth Rappold of

East Troy, Wis., married.

They are tan and wiry, share a passion for sailing, camping,

and cycling, and after only a few years of marriage, actually

resemble each other.

Their children approved whole-heartedly of their parent's

new spouse and of the process. In fact, according to the Rappolds'

Christmas card, Ruth's daughter is getting married next summer to

a man SHE met through an ad in the personals. "It really does

work!" Ruth wrote.

* * * *

Last month Cal Beverly stunned his staff by posting a notice of

his engagement on the office bulletin board. The announcement

shattered their perception of The Citizen's publisher as a

dispassionate newsman, and one not overly interested in the

potential of the Internet.

Beverly met Joyce Drinkwater of Louisville, Ga., in July

through the Christian Connection, an Internet dating service. The

mother of 13- and 9-year-old sons is owner and publisher of the only

newspaper in Jefferson County, southwest of Augusta.

Drinkwater accepted Beverly's diamond ring on Christmas

Eve, and the wedding will take place sometime in 1999, probably in

her Methodist church in Louisville. Beverly asserts that the

reaction of his adult children ranges from ecstatic to cautious; her sons

are acquiescent.

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