When Lyndie met Lady Bird
Lyndon Baines Johnson met Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor only a few weeks after she graduated from the University of Texas, in 1934.
Johnson was 26 years old at the time, and he was helping the Texas congressman Richard Kleberg, in Austin, Texas. They went only on one breakfast date, at the end of which Johnson proposed marriage. She only said that she would think about it.
Then, he returned to Washington and sent her letters and telegrams every day until he came back to Auston 10 weeks later, when she said yes. “Sometimes Lyndon simply takes my breath away” as she wrote about her husband.
When Richie met Pattie
Thelma “Pat” Ryan graduated from the University of Southern California in 1937, at only 25 years old. She instantly got a job as a high school teacher in Whittier, a small town close to Los Angeles, and became a member of the amateur theatrical group the Whittier Community Players.
Back in 1938, Richard Nixon, who was a 26-year-old lawyer who had just opened a firm in the proximity of La Habra, joined the same theater group, believing that having acting skills would help him in the courtroom.
In their first performance, Nixon was cast opposite Ryan. He asked her on a date and then asked her to marry him when they went on their first date. Three years later, they were married.
When Ronnie met Nancy
Reagan wrote in his autobiography that he first saw his wife when she came to him for help.
He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild, and she just couldn’t get a job acting in movies because there was another actress, called Nancy Davis too, whose name was on the Hollywood blacklist of alleged communists.
However, according to Jon Weiner’s book Professors, Politics, and Pop, SAG records proved that Nancy’s blacklist problem happened in 1953, a year after the Reagans were already married.
So how did they meet?
According to Reagan biographer Anne Edwards, Nancy had recently become an MGM contract player, when she told a friend of Reagan’s that she wanted to meet him.
When Georgie met Laura
Joe and Jan O’Neill were living in Midland, Texas, and were old childhood friends with Laura Welch. In 1975, a different childhood friend, George W. Bush, returned to Midland.
The O’Neills then bugged Laura for a while to go out with George, but she didn’t want to.
Then, she later added that the O’Neills wanted to get them together “because they were the only two people from that era in Midland who weren’t dating.”
After a while, she finally agreed to meet with him, when she was 30 and he was 31. They were both smitten, and they married three months later.
When Barry met Michelle
In 1989, Michelle Robinson was still working at a Chicago law firm, when she had to mentor a summer associate that came from Harvard and had a very “weird name”: Barack Obama.
Later, Barack, who was 27 at the time, asked Michelle, who was 25, on a date.
She later said that she was reluctant to date one of the few black men over there because it was “tacky”.
However, she finally said yes, and after dating for a couple of months, she was the one to suggest getting married. He wasn’t interested.
Then, she asked him again a couple of years later, on a dinner date, and he said no again. But when dessert showed up, there was an engagement ring in a box. They got married in 1992.
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