Bowling Battle Builds Bonds

Jamie & Brent Watson

South Portland TA and Portland EA

In what may have been one of the fi rst ever chat rooms, Jamie and Brent Watson exchanged a mutual love of football. Brent spent a lot of time in the computer lab during college in order to avoid a diffi cult roommate and Jamie was enrolled in a computer class learning about what everyone in 1996 referred to as the World Wide Web. The two were at separate colleges, hundreds of miles away from each other, connected only through the Internet.

“My teacher had us go to a site where you could chat with other people, and I chose to chat with Brent because we both used our fi rst names instead of creating a screen name. We chatted over email and the phone, and the next month I drove with my roommate to meet him in Washington, D.C.,” said Jamie.

It was a risky move Jamie kept a secret from her family for a year but one Brent is more than glad she was willing to make. “I fell hard pretty quickly. As Jamie was leaving to go back to Alabama after we had

met for the fi rst time, the pain of seeing her leave made it easy to say, ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ She was unlike anyone I had ever met before, or since, for that matter. It was that quick. I just knew,” said Brent.

The teaching duo have been together for 20 years and married for 14 of those years. At one point they both coached softball at Deering High School in Portland—Brent JV and Jamie 9th grade. (Jamie claims she won every scrimmage). The couple now work in diff erent districts, Jamie in South Portland and Brent in Portland, and have two school-aged children they enjoy spending summers with—which is one of the best things Jamie says about being married to another educator. “Now we have the summers off with our kiddos, and we cherish those times as they are going by way too fast.”

Beth & Gerry French RSU 71 EA

Theirs is a love story you think only exists in the movies. Gerry and Beth French have been friends since they were pre-school aged. While the pair lived in neighboring towns, through the years they would run into each other, eventually becoming high school sweethearts. As teenagers, they went to the prom together, graduated and eventually got married. The couple is now raising children in a home where cocoa stations in the winter and trips to the beach in the summer are the norm.

Day to day, while Gerry and Beth work in the same district, their lives don’t cross paths, she teaches 3rd grade and he’s a school bus driver. However, when the fi nal bell rings, the two begin to work for a greater good, and have a strong passion for their local associations. “We are both Union Leaders in our RSU—we are VP’s of our units (Teachers/ESP) and this has off ered us the opportunity to work together as colleagues,” said Beth who says she had a feeling at a pretty young age she and Gerry would have a lifetime of working together. “I knew that he was "the one" on our fi rst date, and I was right, because we had the pleasure of celebrating our 20-year wedding anniversary with our MEA family during the week of the NEA Representative Assembly in Orlando last summer. That was a very special memory!” said Beth.