Written by Kelly Roberson
Photos by Duane Tinkey
Margo + Don
Grand Adventure
Rarely do blind dates work out as well as they did for Margo and Don Blumenthal.
The two met at the University of Oklahoma in Norman on a blind date set up by Margo’s brother. Don, a Des Moines native, was 21 and Margo was 17, on her first outing in college. Don innocently asked Margo if she knew how to swim. When the answer was “yes,” he picked her up at her dorm and then drove 80 miles to Turner Falls State Park. Once there, he got out of the car and promptly dove off a 50-foot cliff, urging Margo to follow him. “I was just a freshman and didn’t know better,” Margo recalls. “I thought if the jump didn’t work out successfully, my parents would ground me my first week in college.”
She survived the jump, and after a picnic, the two went back to his apartment, where he made her dinner. Both eventually dozed off to “The Ed Sullivan Show;” by the time Margo woke up, it was past her 9 p.m. curfew. The punishment was called “campusing”—essentially grounding from anything but classes—and it lasted one week. When Don called to see how long her restrictions would last, he also asked her to type a paper for him. “I decided to rewrite his paper,” Margo says. “He got a B+, so it was really my first ‘grade’ on a college paper.”
Strictures of the day meant the two didn’t even share a goodnight kiss on that first date, but Margo—who told her roommate that she’d never known anyone like Don—was hooked by Don’s sense of adventure, a streak that didn’t let up even on their wedding day, five years later in 1967. Hosts to a big Southern affair with 450 guests, Don and Margo (and her maid of honor) found themselves stranded on the way to the reception on a dirt road in 107-degree heat. Don, out with fraternity brothers the night before, had run her car out of gas. The next day, the couple left for a three-week honeymoon to Puerto Rico. Don, taking a run at gambling their first day, lost nearly the whole vacation fund in an hour. Margo, in her first and last gambling attempt, won it all back and then some.
The couple moved to Des Moines after they married and have one daughter, Joscelyn. Over the years, Don has built several businesses, including Steel Warehousing, Budget Storage and Laser Resources. They’ve traveled the globe, summited mountains, and had all sorts of adventures. “I’ve never had a boring day,” Margo says. “It’s been a wild ride.”
Tim + Frank
Best Friends
It was not, as they say, love at first sight. In fact, when Tim Hickman and Frank Vaia met in the summer of 1988, they felt something akin to, well, disdain. Each had been cast—Frank, hastily, several weeks late—in a Des Moines Community Playhouse production of “Cabaret.” Frank, then 42, pigeonholed Tim, 25 and ponytailed, as “some sort of artsy type.” Tim quickly assessed Frank: “I thought, ‘Oh, this guy has to be a jerk; he’s way too attractive to be anything but.’ ”
As part of the male chorus, the two shared a low-rent dressing room. It was there that they came to realize a simple fact: They had nothing in common with the rest of the male cast, so they could talk to each other or talk to no one. Those first short conversations led to shared coincidences, and a friendship quickly took root.
Their Playhouse rehearsals coincided with a time of upheaval. Tim, raised Southern Baptist, had not yet come out, and Frank, post-divorce, was still ruminating on his future; neither was happy in his respective career. So they spent what they came to call “Super Saturdays” together—nothing formal, just two friends sharing errands and adventures. Then one Saturday, Tim got a call: Frank was ill and in the hospital (it turned out to be a blood infection from a splinter). That call and what followed was a test, really, of a relationship that wasn’t quite in bloom but had been tended to nonetheless. “It took something we were not that sure about and made us think,” Tim says. On Oct. 8 of that year, they had a date at Waterfront Seafood Market and decided, over a bowl of spilled chowder, to make their relationship official.
Married or not, a quarter-century commitment is no small feat. The passage of time alone offers tests that any couple must face or fall apart. Tim and Frank credit their longevity to that first friendship cemented at the Playhouse—and to their inability to stay mad at each other.
Because the government never acknowledged their commitment, they chose to do so on their own by hosting a party every five years. “We believe in the power of waking up every day and making a choice to be with someone,” Tim says.
On Jan. 19—Tim’s birthday—in 2010, a year after the Iowa Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, the two were joined, officially and quietly, witnessed by family and celebrated with a small group of friends. It was the state’s recognition of what the two have known all along. “I have the perfect life,” Tim says.
Li + Justin
Global Romance
Some people bond over shared history. Some find connections through work. For Li Zhao and Justin Mandelbaum, it was Chinese dumplings that became the crucial twist in their respective fates.
In 2008, Li, then 26, was on a global hopscotch that had taken her from her native China to the Netherlands and then to Des Moines with a job in finance. Justin, then 28, had recently returned to his hometown after attending the University of Pennsylvania and living and working in New York City in real estate development. As young professionals are wont to do, both spent time networking through groups such as the Young Professionals Connection (YPC).
One cold February night in 2009, Li and Justin found themselves at a YPC event at The Front Row in Windsor Heights. Li, with a plate piled high with carrots in front of her, passed by Justin and the two struck up a conversation in which she playfully suggested her name was “Rabbit.” They soon discovered a shared love of travel—Justin had been to China and had lived in Japan—and Li admitted she rarely met someone as well-traveled as herself. Then the conversation turned to food. A better-than-good cook, Justin invited her over for homemade Chinese dumplings.
The two slowly built their relationship, cementing their bond even when Li left for a six-week return visit to China later that year. Shortly after Li returned, the two found themselves in a heated Ping-Pong match at the Des Moines Social Club. “The Chinese have a reputation for being good at Ping-Pong. So do the Mandelbaums,” Justin says. “So when Li beat me in Ping-Pong wearing high heels, I knew for sure I had met my match.”
They launched an import-export company, the China Iowa Group, in April 2010 before getting engaged. Li
says they joked that “we started the company before we got married and said if the company could do well, we could do well.”
And marriage did happen, in two separate ceremonies—one in China, one in the U.S.—in 2011. They’ve maintained their commitment to their now-shared hometown, too. In addition to running China Iowa Group, Justin is spearheading an effort to open a nonprofit studio for painters, potters and sculptors in a retrofitted building just south of Gray’s Lake. “Justin always told me that when he was growing up, Des Moines was a totally different place,” Li says. “We are very excited to grow together with the city, and to call Des Moines home.”
And they’ll continue to grow their relationship, even as they trace it back to that one fateful evening at The Front Row. “I was having a very good day that day,” Justin says. “Luck was on my side.”
Teree + Vernon
Twists of Fate
When Teree Caldwell relocated to Iowa from California in 1982, she was not looking for love. It was a job—as assistant city manager for Ames—that lured the Kansas native from the sunny shores of San Diego.
Because of Ames’ relatively small African-American population, the arrival of a new member to that community precipitated a welcome party, and Vernon Johnson was at that gathering. A single parent with two teenage boys, Vernon struck up a conversation with Teree and soon realized that the two lived only three blocks from each other. So Vernon did what any able-bodied, available male would do when presented with a smart, pretty, available woman.
He set her up with several of his friends.
“I think he thought he was being shrewd,” Teree says with a laugh. The strategy soon fizzled out, and one day Vernon called Teree and asked her out to a lecture.
Cultural events were a way Vernon pushed himself out of his comfort zone. He was busy with Vernon Jr., then 16, and William, 13, as well as a job with Children and Families of Iowa in Des Moines. “I had given up finding a mate through traditional ways at that time—bars and such,” Vernon says. “I began looking at cultural events to pick and choose things I would have never done.”
For 47-year-old Vernon, a former professional football player, that included, among other things, ballet. (“I used to spend a lot of time at the dance studio, so if he was going to see me, that was where it would be,” Teree says.) Vernon
enjoyed opening up that side of himself, she adored his sons, and the couple shared an affinity for other things—sports, to name one. “I call him my gentle giant,” Teree says. “The first time I saw him, he was in jeans and cowboy boots.”
Then in 1984, Teree was offered a job as chief of staff for the city manager in San Antonio. Vernon proposed marriage two days before she was scheduled to leave. “I told him, ‘I love you and I’ll marry you, but I’m still going to take that job,’ ” Teree says.
And so began a commuter marriage. Three years into their arrangement, they flipped a coin; Iowa won and Teree moved back to Ames in 1988, and the family relocated Des Moines in 1996. The couple had two more children—Baley, now 23, and Baxtyr, 21—and Vernon retired in 2008. Teree is now CEO of Oakridge Neighborhood and Oakridge Neighborhood Services and a member of the Des Moines School Board.
Looking back, she still seems astounded by the twists of fortune, fate, luck and persistence. “I was in San Diego for a year and a half and dated twice, and then came to Ames and found the man of my dreams,” she says. “Who would have thought?”
Terry + RJ
Worth the Wait
It took a decade, but love—or fate or luck or coincidence—finally conspired to bring Terry and RJ Hernandez together.
The two met in 1987—she while on a date with her then-boyfriend, RJ while working at his restaurant, Raul’s, and singing in his group Los Guitares de Mexico. Terry found herself instantly smitten by his charismatic personality; she even conspired to arrange a double date with RJ and his then-girlfriend.
Then Terry lost her job and fell into survival mode; her subsequent three jobs didn’t leave much time for keeping in touch with RJ. But she knew his cousin Randy, so she kept tabs on him from a distance.
A decade later in 1997, Terry, then 41, was working at the YMCA of Greater Des Moines. One day when she was leaving, RJ, then 40, happened to be at the front door. “I looked at him, and he had a big smile on his face and said, ‘Well Terry Henderson, I haven’t seen you for years,’ ” Terry recalls. “I melted.”
The two began seeing more of each other when Terry volunteered to help with RJ’s annual cancer benefit (he’s a cancer survivor). Eventually they arranged a real date to see the movie “Contact.” Its spiritual questioning and the couple’s discussions about faith and values were the clincher for RJ.
Two years later, the couple married in front of a justice of the peace in Cozumel, Mexico. They still share a devotion to work and volunteering but are equally happy spending time on their acreage outside Des Moines with three rescued American Staffordshire terriers. Terry is now executive director of the Chrysalis Foundation, and RJ, who went back to school after Raul’s closed, is the statewide program director with Life-Line Resources’ Youth Foundation.
Both say that their willingness to accept each other for who they are has been key. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with such a big heart,” Terry says. “If he has 50 cents left, he will give you a dollar. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with him in the first place.”
