Jeff Meek dialed the wrong number in 1969, but he reached the person he most wanted to talk with anyway.
He was trying to reach a friend, but he mistakenly called the room Jeanne Fogler and her friends had just moved into after a fire forced them to evacuate their old dorm.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
He says: “I said to myself, ‘Wow.’”
She says: “I got all squiggly inside. I really felt like I connected with him. It was his deep brown eyes and his hairy chest. He had a real manly look. I liked that.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “I had the most fun on my wedding day than I have at any wedding I’ve ever attended. I was probably a little bit nervous, but I just remember being at ease with my decision.”
She says: “I got emotional at one point because it was my brother who walked me down the aisle, and I was missing my dad. But I was excited and so proud to walk down the aisle with Jeff and just hopeful for a great future.”
My advice for a lasting marriage is:
He says: “Compromise. Don’t keep score. Be forgiving. And always find some time for each other.”
She says: “Share your faith. Be able to laugh at yourself and forgive. And work as a team.”
Jeff, a student at Western Illinois University in Macomb had admired Jeanne since he first saw her in his freshman biology class the year before.
"I would always get there before her, and I'm a kind of a sit-in-the-back kind of guy, and Jeanne is definitely a sit-in-the-first-couple-of-rows kind of person," Jeff says.
He saw her at a dance at the student union a few weeks after classes started and asked her to dance.
"We danced and then she said, 'Thank you,' and turned around and walked politely away," he says. "I thought, 'Well, that didn't go so well.'" He saw her a few more times over the next few months, once riding around campus on the tailgate of an old station wagon.
"She had on a really short pair of blue jean shorts," he says, "and I saw her walking down a street once in a pair of tall boots and a pair of hot pants."
He was trying to call a friend one day but instead of that guy's voice, he heard a girl's on the line. A casual conversation started, and that girl passed the phone to her roommates. One of them suggested he and a couple of his buddies meet them in the cafeteria for lunch.
"Who doesn't want to go meet a bunch of girls when you're 19 years old?" he says.
The invitation was a pleasant surprise, but it wasn't the biggest one -- Jeanne was.
"We walked into the cafeteria, and there she was, sitting there. She was one of those three girls."
Lunch became a regular thing for the group.
"I would flirt every time I saw him," Jeanne says.
She didn't remember him from the dance or the class.
"She didn't know any of this background stuff. I didn't make any moves or advances or anything," Jeff says. "I didn't ask her out or anything because, you know, I thought back to that dance."
Jeanne asked Jeff's friend why he wasn't asking her out, though, and that was just the push Jeff needed. He asked her to go with him to find some night crawlers. One of the guys in the fraternity Jeff was pledging had assigned him to find bait for his fishing trip the next day.
"So in a rain storm Jeanne came with me and held the flashlight, and I picked up night crawlers. I remember we both got drenched, and her hair got all frizzy, and I really wowed her on our first date. There's no question about that," Jeff says. "The type of date that we had after that was definitely an improvement from chasing night crawlers in a rain storm."
In the fall of 1972, he was student teaching and she started her first teaching job in another town. He would go down and visit her on weekends. On one of those visits, they planned to have a dinner of chateaubriand and Chianti at a nice restaurant. Jeff had tucked an engagement ring into his bag that he intended to give to her at dinner, but he couldn't wait.
"We were just sitting on the edge of my little sofa, and he really just kind of flopped it over in my lap," Jeanne says. She eventually said yes, but first she said, "I don't know if I want this!'" Jeff laughs.
"When I opened it, it was just so big, and I was just kind of scared," she explains. "I'm just not good with surprises. I had no idea it was coming then."
They were married June 30, 1973, in Taylorville, Ill.
Jeanne and Jeff are retired educators and live in Hot Springs Village.
After their son, also named Jeff, joined the Marines in 1996, the elder Jeff developed an interest in military history and began interviewing war veterans. He started sending the VHS tapes of the interviews to veterans and their families, and then began writing about them in a monthly column for the Hot Springs Village Voice. From there he became a staff writer, then managing editor, a position he is leaving so he and Jeanne can travel more.
He will continue doing the column and the interviews, and planning veterans' events, like the recent screening of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War, premiering on PBS on Sept. 17. Jeanne packages and sends his veteran interviews to the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress, and she helps him plan and host events.
The Meeks' son lives in Frisco, Texas. Their daughter, Jennifer Meek, lives in Oakland, Calif. They have one grandson.
No one likes making mistakes, but Jeff has obviously made the best of his.
"I just lucked out with the wrong phone call," Jeff says. "I mean it, she's been a real blessing to me."
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High Profile on 09/03/2017