This picture was taken in front of the Mount Lemmon Inn, sometime in the summer of 1967;  MamaCharlie and I were dating then. We drove up the mountain from Tucson; it was a winding twenty-seven-mile drive up through three or four different levels of vegetation from desert floor to piney forests. There were rock formations and huge cacti and amazing views. It was a great drive and a great day together. We stopped at the Inn for lunch; I had a steak...I don't remember what Charlie ate...she didn't eat a lot back then. I talked to some local guys in the restaurant about going down the other side of the mountain and learned that it wasn't too good an idea without four-wheel drive. My immediate thought, stemming from the fact that I was an experienced Army truckdriver with lots and lots of miles off-road and was at that time an instructor teaching new Army drivers how to drive off-road, was to take off that way just to show them boys. But caution in favor of my GTO swayed me to go down the way we came up. It was one of many days we spent together in that magic summer. We met in April. We hit it off immediately. For the next few months I spent every day I could with her. I was stationed at Fort Huachuca; it was seventy-one miles from the front gate to the parking lot at Arizona Hall, the dorm at the University of Arizona where Charlie lived. I made the trip every weekend and sometimes three times a week. Some days I was so run down from the driving that I would fall across my bunk when I got off work and wake up, still fully dressed, the next morning when it was time to go back to work. But I was obsessed. I had to be with her every chance I got. We were married in October and looking back at it now, I don't know why we waited so long...we could have married after the first date and everything would have worked out just fine. Now it is over forty-three years later. I have retired and now spend every day with her...every day...and it still isn't enough, I am just as obsessed, just as crazy about her as I was in 1967. So this is my Valentine's story...

And by the way, the Mount Lemmon Inn would receive my highest recommendation as a day trip and lunch stop...but it burned to the ground in the early '70s, in a huge forest fire.