A Love Story
A n a l b u m o f f a m i l y ph otograp h s coveri n g a marri age o f 6 5 y e a r s , wi th text from F ork l an d .
In the fall of 1951, Frank Waters Rogers, Jr., and his twin, Robert Jett Rogers, joined me from Princeton to study law at the University with the class of 1954. Each was called Bo-Bob to overcome the difficulty of distinguishing them in their childhood. In the winter of 1952, big Frank proposed to father that we should be finished out with a summer tour of Europe and England, where close kin for them remained. We took a train to New York and found our way to the pier at Hoboken where student passage to Rotterdam with the Holland American Line had been booked on the SS Waterman, a converted troop transport Liberty Ship.
Ziggy and Bad Man Bob
I was in a queue to embark, dressed in seersucker and bow tie, when my gaze lifted above a quilt of Syracuse sweatshirts to behold at a distance a young woman wearing a salt and pepper silk suit and stockings waiting to board. I fell in love with the sight of her. It was as if I were Isaac come in the place of his father’s servant. There was no touch, no smell, no spoken word. Just the sight of her. Rebecca at the well. Lucy on the quay!
Lucy on the Quay
Lucy and Marion Street
After we had put to sea, I passed her and a curly blond companion, sitting propped against a bulkhead taking in the sun. I was blessed with just enough sense to see where it would get me if I presented myself as Wilbur Lee Hazlegrove from Roanoke, Virginia, and with enough heifer dust in my nose to circle around the superstructure and whisper audibly to the blond in passing that her friend looked meaner than a snake.
Soon after, I saw them in the salon where ten- cents Heineken was served at room temperature and as much as a week was left in a nine-day passage.
I knelt beside her to apologize and was not cast away. After each of us overcame the shock of our first names (I had only known a pointer bitch by that name), I gathered hope that I could be something she just might be looking for.
Lucy Levis and Marion Streett were of a party of four from St. Louis and Connecticut on a guided tour. Our schedule was flexible and we adapted it to join them, first in Paris and later at the Hotel Britannica and Beau Site at Menton, on the French-Italian Riviera.
Anne Hume
Marion
Niels Vinding
Lucy
Polly
Wilbur
Niels Vinding
Bob Rogers
The return was magical. In New York, we met at the Biltmore to make plans and say goodbye. I visited her in St. Louis over Thanksgiving and she came to Charlottesville that winter. We met during spring break in Fort Lauderdale, staying with her aunt Marjorie and visiting with her grandmother, Bessie Dunn. I had extruded one hundred sixty-five pounds to a six feet two length of linguine but Bessie beheld me, not as a praying mantis but a Greek god!
Wilbur
Lucy
Marion Street
Polly Hume
We engaged to marry in early summer and were wed in St Louis on September the 11th ,1953 at St Michael’s and St George’s Episcopal Church. The Reverend John Francis Sant blessed the union. Years before, when Lucy was a little girl the Reverend Karl Morgan Block, had been St Michael’s Rector. Interestingly, Dr Block had once been the Chaplain of Woodberry School and then, upon moving to Roanoke, led the congregation of St John’s Episcopal Church, where Jennie and Perk Hazlegrove had been married. Dr Block was consecrated the coadjutor bishop of California September 29th, 1938
Leaving St. Michael’s and St. George’s, St. Louis
Grandmother Bessie Cary Dunn Polly Hume
Joe Hazlegrove
Wilbur
Lucy
Grandmother Pauline Guy Levis
Wilbur’s Mother Jennie Hazlegrove
Lucy’s Mother Lola Levis
Our wedding reception was held in the mansion of Lucy’s grandparents, Mr and Mrs Robert Harry Levis. The great stone house was sited on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River at Alton. Illinois.
The night our engagement was announced in Roanoke Summer of 1953.
Wilbur, Lucy and Lawrence Askew the morning of our wedding.
I had taken the bar exam in June and learned that I had passed before we married. After a wedding trip to Sea Island, we returned to Charlotteville and lived in John Minor’s guest cottage off Hydraulic Road. I had the world on a string - sitting on a rainbow. Lucy drove me to classes at Clark Hall in a Ford Sunliner convertible given by her father as a wedding present. John Cameron Swazey and PaulHarvey came to us in transit over the car radio.
Our assets were augmented by Watson, a standard poodle given us by Perk’s widow, Sallie, and the inheritance of a collection of yellow brindle cats that we named with help from T. S. Eliot. They nested in the tattered box springs that underlay the marital bed from which they emerged in the dead of night to sometimes awaken me, kneading my supine breast and peering into my eyes to assure me that I was marked forever as their own.
Watson
Toward Christmas, the suspicion grew that either or both of us were infertile. After Easter, conception became unavoidable.
Cary Middleton Hazlegrove The morning of her baptism. St. Michael and St. George St. Louis 1955
Christmas 1956
1958
Easter 1960
Northport Point Summer 1962
Summer 1964 with Claire and Molly Meredith
Easter 1965 Back yard, 2522 Crystal Spring Ave
Roanoke Country Club 1964
Northport Point circa 1964
Northport Point 1966
Our 24th wedding anniversary, NPP Michigan Summer 1976
First Christmas at 310 Willow Oak Drive 1965
Christmas 1981
Christmas 1986 Christmas 1998
New York 1976
Sarah’s graduation from North Cross School 1977 Billy
Cary
Perneller Chubb
Page
Sarah
Lucy
!977
Wilbur
Christmas 1990 Billy the only child home with Jack and Sadie.
Paris, Jardin De Tuileries 1981
Page and Peter’s wedding Northport Point, Michigan 1988
Northport Point 40th wedding Anniversary
Page and Peter, Anna and Ry NPP August 1995
Virginia Page Boxley Bullington’s christening 1998
Nantucket
Northport Point
Sarah, Virginia, Ryland, Anna, Ben and Cary Nantucket circa 2000
Lucy in studio circa 1997
Wilbur in Figaro - Roanoke Opera
Stoney Point NPP 2001
Mont St. Michel with Anna 2007
Paris 2010
Paris. Sacre Coeur 2010
Bofinger restaurant, Paris 2010
Paris, Montmartre 2010
Venice 2010
Billy’s Wedding September 2010
Billy’s Wedding September 2010
Christmas 2012
59th Anniversary 2014
Quebec February 2013
Anna’s Birthday 2013
Wilbur at under the old oak tree at Forkland. 2013
Lucy at studio on 220 South. 2014
60th Wedding Anniversary
The farm 2015
Anna, Lucy, Wilbur and Virginia. NPP 2015
Christmas 2016
At my 65th Woodberry Forest reunion dinner, I was seated next to Alice Jane Fiveash, my classmate’s wife. Their marriage has endured. We had not seen them for years, and she asked me how I had met Lucy. My love story provoked her approximately to say: “My son told me he thought he might be in love. I yelled at him, “son falling in love is not something you think about. If you do, it hasn’t happened”.
Our conversation rhetorically continued: “Did we live happily ever after? Only if you think we married late this morning. Could you get along without her? Maybe for an afternoon”.
A Christmas gift from Sarah 2014. Edited Christmas 2017