Love is in the air! As Valentine’s Day approaches, it’s fun to look back at memories of how we met our sweetheart. Geneva’s history includes a lot of these stories. Many of our alumni met and fell in love with their significant other on our campus, including the couples featured here.
Drew Gordon ’82 and Lynne (Hutmire) Gordon ’ 83
Drew and I got to know each other in journalism classes and across the table at editorial staff meetings of The Cabinet. He was a year ahead, quiet and smart, and we eventually became friends. I had no romantic interest and had no reason to think that he did either. We were both passionate about producing the newspaper each week and worked long after midnight with the rest of the staff to get The Cabinet to the Ellwood City Ledger by 7 a.m. for printing on their big web press.
I was actually mad when he was elected editor for his senior year. I imagined myself more qualified but had to be content with the assistant editor position at that time. However, he proved very capable and easy to work alongside, and my appreciation for his steadfastness and wisdom grew. I found he took his Christian faith seriously and strove to love mercy and do justice in his journalism, something that was encouraged in us by our journalism professor and Cabinet advisor, Kay Day.
In January, months before he was to graduate, a large group of us went out for food and fun and I ended up having a sweet dance with Drew. It was supposed to be a silly, fast dance, but the music awkwardly changed to a slow song “Open Arms” by Journey. Flustered though I was, in those minutes, I recognized a change in my affections. After all this time, could we be more than friends?
Weeks later, we were putting together the Valentine’s Day issue of The Cabinet. The newspaper made a bit of extra petty cash by selling Valentine’s classified ads. Working over the light tables to wax down the typeset columns onto boards, I snuck in a little message of appreciation to Drew. I boldly signed it with an I LOVE YOU. We were good enough friends, I thought, that he could take this statement any way he wished, but I was hoping for an interpretation of the romantic sort.
We finished in the wee hours. All the boards were zipped into a portfolio for delivery to the printer, and we walked back to our dorms. What I didn’t know is that Drew had spied my classified and had typeset a response. He pretended to go to Young Hall but then doubled back down to The Cabinet office. As the rest of us were falling asleep, he turned the light tables and hot waxer back on and adjusted the layout to fit in his reply.
In the morning, I grabbed a printed newspaper from Alexander Hall as I boarded a bus at the Route 18 stop to head home for the weekend. On the bus, I looked to see how my message looked in print. A little scary. I wondered if I was going to ruin our good friendship. And then I saw it: Drew’s reply. The shock of seeing a reply in print was magnified by its content. He seemed to be returning my admiration, something that I could hardly believe, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it all weekend. We had no cell phones back then to talk or text. I could hardly wait to get back to campus.
Fast forward to 2023: we’ll have been married 40 years this summer. 37 of those years, we have worked side by side in publishing. Drew is still a good friend and the love of my life—still steadfast in the face of any adversity. The good Lord has given us children—one a Geneva alumna (Katherine Gordon McKerley ’15)—and grandchildren. We are grateful for His providential timing and place of the beginning of our story.
-Lynne (Hutmire) Gordon ‘83
John R. Eppinger, Jr ’68 and Sandra (Wehman) Eppinger ‘68
I have many good memories of Geneva, but one certainly has had a long-lasting result. I began my time there with courses that would enable me to go into engineering or chemistry. But after the first year, I decided that neither of those areas was where I wanted to go, so in my sophomore year I changed to accounting. My roommate John Day ’68 had also switched to accounting and we were in all the same accounting classes until we graduated.
Our first instructor was Mrs. Lillian Gault, whom I remember as a very good and caring teacher. These were pre-computer days. All our work was done on columnar paper, and our work was generally done with a pen, not in pencil. But on one particular day in class, John Day and I must have begun our work in pencil and Mrs. Gault said it was okay to finish the assignment that way.
The problem was that there were long-standing instructions for the student who graded papers for Mrs. Gault that work done in pencil received an automatic D. When we received our assignments back the next class period, both papers were marked accordingly. We knew we had completed the work correctly, and there were no corrections on our papers, so what was with the D, we wondered? The problem, unknown to us, was that Mrs. Gault had forgotten to tell the student grading the papers to permit the use of pencil for that day. But in the end, the D grade was a done deal. We were unhappy, so a friend of ours asked if we would like to meet the grader who gave us this “unfair” grade. We were, of course, happy to do so.
That grader was Sandra Wehman ’68. The conversation began with a little complaining on our part, particularly mine, but on learning that she was grading as she had been instructed to, the issue went away. The good result was that I liked the grader. Although Sandie and I were not in many accounting classes together since she was a year ahead of me in accounting, our relationship bloomed throughout our remaining years at Geneva, resulting in our marriage four days after we graduated. And the rest, as they say, is history - over 54 years later.
-John R. Eppinger, Jr. ‘68
Daniel Havrilla ’18 and Megan (Siegle) Havrilla ‘18
Daniel and I met at dinner at Alex’s with some mutual friends early on during our freshman year. We both ended up in The Genevans where Doc said, “Look around, your future spouse may be in this room!” We both laughed at the time, but fast forward to senior year and we started dating and got married a year after graduation! Now we have been married for close to 4 years and have a wonderful son.
-Megan (Siegle) Havrilla ‘18
The Keul Family
The Keul family love story all began in 1953. Albert Keul ‘56, a commuter from Ellwood City, PA studying Industrial Engineering, met Mary Ann Hamilton ‘56, from Edgewood, PA studying Elementary Education. The story goes that Albert wanted to go to the Halloween social held in Johnston Gym to meet the freshmen girls. Little did he know, he would end up meeting the love of his life there. In December of 1955, Albert proposed to Ann in Old Main, near the clock on the first floor. They were married on August 18, 1956. In the years to come, they settled in nearby Ellwood City and proceeded to have three children who each went to Geneva: Elaine (Keul) Geisel ’82, Stephen Keul ’84 ’89 and Kurt Keul ’89.
Steve, a Communication and Industrial Management major met Adele Graham ‘84, an Elementary Education major from Washington Boro, PA. Steve met Adele when he went to relieve her of her shift at the desk in Skye Lounge. They married on July 20, 1985.
A few years later, Kurt, an Industrial Engineering major, met Tina Ditmer ’89, a Business Administration major from Mechanicsburg, PA. Kurt and Tina don’t recall when they actually met, but it was probably in a Mr. Jordan course. On Christmas Eve 1989, Kurt proposed on the steps of Old Main, and they were married on September 22, 1990.
Roughly two decades later, Kurt and Tina’s daughter, Megan (Keul) King ’18 decided to attend Geneva College to major in Elementary and Special Education. Remarkably, Megan is the only grandchild out of Albert and Ann’s seven grandchildren who went to Geneva. While Megan did not meet her sweetheart at Geneva, her high school sweetheart Jesse King decided to propose on the steps of Old Main on a foggy Friday night in February 2018. Jesse knew the family’s sweetheart history at Geneva and Megan’s close ties with her family and wanted to continue the legacy. Jesse and Megan were married on June 1, 2019.
So far, there are five great-grandchildren of Albert and Ann… Who knows? Maybe in a few decades, there will be another love story to document.
-Tina (Ditmer) Keul ‘89
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