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Three romances that got a start at Rutgers

BY FREDDA SACHAROW

For Valentine's Day, Rutgers Today presents three couples who met, courted, and married while working at Rutgers. They include neurobiologists, a labor relations scholar, and student life staffers, and they range in age from new parents to retirees. But they all experienced the joy of falling in love at Rutgers.

Anthony Doody and Marcela Caro: Finding love in a crowd on College Avenue

When Anthony Doody caught sight of Marcela Caro across a crowded quad, his brain registered one immediate, irrepressible thought: "Wow. Where did she come from?"

Chile, it turns out, but Doody couldn't have imagined that back in 2001, when he spotted her in a crowd on New Brunswick's College Avenue. Doody, director of programs and leadership for university Student Life, had stepped out of his office for a morning stroll.

Caro, now program coordinator for Rutgers' Study Abroad office, was equally smitten.

"I saw Tony in the crowd, walking, and I wondered who he was. I liked him at first sight," she says in the rhythms of her native South America. "He was tall, someone who met all my physical requirements, and I was single, new to campus, waiting to meet the man of my life."

Though brief, the encounter remained on both their minds. But it wasn't until months later that Doody showed up, ostensibly for a flu shot — that old trick — at the campus health center where Caro worked at the time as an administrative assistant and medical translator.

"I was so nervous I didn't know what to do," recalls Caro nearly a decade later. "All I knew is that I had to talk with him, or I would forever lose the opportunity to meet the man of my life. Inside me, a voice said, ‘Don't let him go!' "

Seeking entry into Doody's world, she approached him carrying a brochure promoting one of the programs he was overseeing at the Rutgers Recreation department. On the cover was a full-color picture of Doody in snowboarding regalia. With atypical bravado, he asked her if she wanted his autograph.

Not a romance-enhancing move, it turned out.

"I thought he was being too cocky for me," Caro says. "I thought he had great personality, great looks, but when he asked if I wanted him to sign the brochure, it made me think twice."

A shared passion for ballroom dancing saved the day, both agree.

Doody recovered from the autograph fiasco by asking Caro if she wanted to take a dance class with him, specifically a session in intermediate salsa. The South American native, who trained as a classical ballerina before coming to the United States in 1995 and who won a scholarship at the National Ballet Company in Santiago de Chile, couldn't resist.

"I was blown away by how well she picked up salsa," Doody says of that class in the College Avenue Gym. They followed the lesson with dinner at Stage Left, a New Brunswick restaurant, where they sat for hours, closing down the place and saying goodnight only reluctantly.

Did we mention it was Valentine's Day?

The dates that followed involved a series of strenuous activities: dancing, kayaking, snowboarding, motocross, tennis, and mountain biking. "We really hit it off like two kids in a candy store," is how Doody remembers the courtship.

Fittingly, their September 25, 2005, wedding in Voorhees Chapel featured strategic Rutgers touches, including a cake created by Rutgers' Dining Services and landscaping by friends and colleagues from the Cook Campus.

Brian Nash, the ballroom dance instructor who led that initial salsa class at the gym way back when, reprised his crucial role by teaching the 150 wedding guests how to sway to the Latin beat.

"My Irish/Italian family all dancing salsa!" Doody remembers with a grin.

Half a decade later, Caro and Doody's social life revolves around campus, and both wife and husband are raising the next generation of Rutgers grads: 2-year-old Kyle, whose future alma mater would seem pretty well assured — grades permitting, that is.

Elizabeth Abercrombie and James M. Tepper: A meeting of the minds

Some couples bond over a shared love of art or a passion for opera. For Elizabeth Abercrombie and James M. Tepper, it was basal ganglia, the nuclei in the brains of vertebrates that play a role in motor control and learning.

In the early 1990s, "Our labs were one lab apart, so we saw each other every day on the first floor of the CMBN," says Abercrombie, using the acronym for the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience on the Rutgers-Newark Campus.

Not that it was love at first sight for the neurobiologists, both previously divorced. Far from it.

"She didn't like me very much, and I thought she was a workaholic — not very friendly," Tepper says of their initial encounter at a 1989 Philadelphia meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. But over the months, as they worked side-by-side setting up a research unit and stealing away for dinners at nearby McGovern's Tavern, friendship blossomed, ultimately deepening into something more.

"Because we both work on the area of the brain known as the basal ganglia, we were closer than other faculty members who had adjacent labs might have been," Tepper says.

As they served together on Rutgers grant-review panels and drove together to meetings in New Brunswick, their courtship accelerated.

"Probably everybody knew what was going to happen before I did," Tepper says.

What happened was a gathering of the university's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which reviews experiments on animals under federal laws. As they left a long and tiring meeting and sat over beers at a nearby pub, Elizabeth leaned over and said "I love you" to James.

"I said, that's funny, I love you, too," the scientist responded.