A Prelude to Valentine's Day!

This is the Y Center. It will always be the Y Center to me - I'm not sure why they insisted on calling it the Wilkinson Center - the Y Center sounds so much more collegiate!! But they didn't ask me!!

The way it looked then!

But I digress - as I am wont to do on occasion!! I came across this dedicatory program for the Y Center - April 3, 1965 - and thought about how Harry and I met at the Y Center Grand Opening in September of 1964.

It's a bit odd to think that when I started at BYU in 1963, the Y Center was under construction. We used to have a BYU Bookstore in the basement of the then Joseph Smith Building - a building which has been replaced, although it's still called the Joseph Smith Building. The Cougareat was in the basement there too. I remember going down there a time or two, but it wasn't really a campus hub or anything. Heaps 'O Pizza was more of a hub than any building on campus! (I think Heaps is now the Brick Oven.)

Dances were held every Saturday night at Cannon Center - and we went every Saturday night too - that's where I first heard the Beatles in fact!!

Joy and I in our dorm room with our favorite mannequin.

Back to the Y Center Grand Opening though. We all went on Friday night for the weekend event. Harry - whom I didn't know at the time - came up and asked me to dance. The now immortalized dialogue went something like this: "Hey, we match. We should dance." (I was wearing a red sweater and Harry had on a burgundy blazer!) He was cute and so I said yes and we danced a couple of times. I didn't even remember his name although I thought he was very personable.

Next night the big doings were at the Y Center, not Cannon Center, so we all headed there. I saw Harry again and he came up like we were old friends and asked me to dance. I remembered him, but not his name!! I coyly pulled his ID card from his pocket and looked at it - but saw "Harry" and thought, "No young person is named Harry!" (I had a grandpa and an uncle named Harry!)


Harry's mission program photo

But then everyone who walked by said, "Hi Harry," or "How ya doin' Harry," so I figured that was his name!! After dancing for awhile, he suggested we go to the new snack bar for something to eat. We were sitting there and my cousin Pat walked by and said, "Hi Harry, what are you doing here?" Then she saw me and said, "Hi Barbara, how do you know this guy?"

Turned out Harry had been the home teaching (then called ward teaching) companion to my cousin Pat and her family in Covina. It is indeed a small world. When I saw my cousin later at my Uncle George's funeral in SLC, she said she was surprised and didn't know Harry was at BYU.

Later it turned out that Harry and I had an Astronomy class together, and we passed each other every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as he was leaving his French class and I was heading to my English class. Also turned out that he had been at BYU the Spring semester before and had observed me in my French lab all semester!! I was always goofing around with my good friend Linda Bang, so I had not observed him at all. Since he married me, I guess the impression wasn't too negative!

Ah, young love!!

And a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet now wouldn't it? But I'm still going to say that we met at the Y Center!