By Pam Hersh, Special Writer
I sat on the bench in front of Starbucks on Nassau Street three weeks ago and frantically punched letters and numbers on both my personal cell phone and work-designated cell phone that also does e-mail. A voice behind me softly admonished, “Honey, life is too short for all this,” as she made a dismissive hand wave at my electronic devices. I raised my e-weary eyes to see my longtime friend and nationally known actress Georgine Hall. She had a beatific look on her face and a glint in her eye that made her appear more like 25, instead of her chronological age of 85. I asked what wonderful thing was happening in her life.
”I am getting married,” said the Princeton resident, most recently seen on the McCarter stage in the 2007 production of “Mrs. Packard.” “Married to someone I met 67 years ago. And I am following him to Texas where we will be spending most of our time, with occasional trips to Princeton.”
Abandoning my obsessive checking of e-mail, I said how happy I was for her joy and how sad for her imminent departure. I stifled the cynical instinct to ask “Why on earth or in heaven would you do something like this?”
Reading my astonishment, she said “Why? I will tell you why why not?”
As I heard more about this romance, I fell in love with the script a love story created without the help of any modern electronic technology, but throwing off more sparks than a teenage romance. This was no match made in e-land with e-harmony or any other of the e-dating services.
The two of them met 67 years ago at Nassau Presbyterian Church, when he was a student at Princeton University and she was a student at Wilson College in Pennsylvania.
Living in Princeton with her grandmother on Alexander Street, the beautiful 18-year-old was home on holiday break when she caught the eye of the Princeton University student, Daniel B. Stouffer, as they both attended a social event at the church. Smitten after one date, he asked her to “wait for him” as he headed off to fight for his country in World War II.
She told him she could wait for no one, had to go to New York to pursue her acting career. And that was that until 67 years and three husbands, on her part, and one wife, on his part later.
After his wife died, on a whim, Mr. Stouffer decided to look up the charming young woman he had met in Princeton.
The 86-year-old Mr. Stouffer, reflecting his methodical and tenacious civil engineering background, found her without the help of Google or Facebook, but with good old-fashioned detective work. He wrote a letter to Wilson College, which told him all it could, legally, tell him that Ms. Hall had been the subject of many theater reviews in The New York Times over the years.
Mr. Stouffer spent days in the library going through microfilm and found a review that revealed her residence as still being Princeton. Using his Princeton connections, he found her address and wrote to her with a pen on writing paper. They communicated for a few months by means of snail mail, never exchanging phone calls or e-mails. With their friendship reignited, she took a plane to Texas a few months ago and a week later they decided to get married.
The wedding scene was as quaint and as fast as their courtship. They were married in 10 minutes in her Princeton home by her good friend, Lawrence Township Committeewoman and former Lawrence Mayor Pam Mount. Ms. Mount brought a little 21st century technology into the scene, as she had become licensed to perform a wedding through an online “officiant” service.
As a native Princetonian, Georgine had never thought she could ever leave town. She will miss her friends, her job as a theater arts instructor at the Lewis School, her involvement in the New York and Princeton theater communities, Princeton University commencements, her walks downtown, sitting on the benches just watching the people go by, and conversing with her good friends when they were not preoccupied with e-mail and cell phones.
”But I decided that it was important for me to go to his bailiwick. They say travel and seeing and learning new things keeps you young and sharp and this is going to be quite a trip.”
As she said to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, all somewhat incredulous over the whole thing, “We may be as old as mud, but (we’re) not yet dust.”
A longtime resident of Princeton, Pam Hersh is vice president for government and community affairs with Princeton HealthCare System. She is a former managing editor of The Princeton Packet.
