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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.
All he knew was that he had to find out who she was.
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.
He proposed to the love of his life during a Caribbean cruise, the first cruise for either of them. During a port stop in St. Thomas, Tepper led Abercrombie into a jewelry store and encouraged her to pick out a ring. Back on board the cruise ship Galaxy later that night, he got down on one knee and she said yes, all hesitation gone.
The couple returned to St. Thomas one year later, on Aug. 31, 2000, for a beachfront wedding.
"I had been to enough weddings where I saw the bride and groom obsessing over details, so I just said let's go by ourselves," Tepper says. "The guests were Elizabeth and me, the person who married us — who happened to be a minister of the Universal Life Church — and the events coordinator at the resort and her assistant. That's it."
Today, the Boonton Township residents continue to socialize with other Rutgers faculty and staff when they're away from their respective laboratories, and they continue to attend scientific meetings together. He serves as president of the 300-member International Basal Ganglia Society, she as vice president. They'll collaborate on the organization's 10th triennial meeting this June in Long Branch.
Along with their son Jacob, Abercrombie and Tepper are active members of Temple Beth Am in Parsippany, and their calendar fills up with travel, concerts, and family outings.
Jacob, just shy of 9, is as comfortable on the Rutgers campus as his parents. His mother, for one, is hopeful about where this son of two "nerdy science parents" will wind up.
"I can't wait to put him to work in the lab when he's old enough," she laughs.
Charles J. Coleman and Nancy Gulick: A legacy of love, and a passion for the arts
Before Charles J. Coleman retired in 2001 after more than 30 years of teaching at Rutgers-Camden, he and his wife Nancy Gulick had one inviolable household rule: No talking about Rutgers after 9 p.m.
"A complete moratorium was tough to follow," Gulick acknowledged recently, since the couple had met, dated and married against a scarlet background; two of their children are Rutgers grads; and their social network has always encompassed members of the Rutgers community.
The same colleagues came out in large numbers after Coleman died unexpectedly on January 21 of this year, at 76, providing a nurturing environment for Gulick, assistant dean of academic advising for the Camden Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"The expressions of sympathy at the viewing and the funeral, the cards and gifts — the level of it surprised me," said Gulick, who returned to work on February 2. She continues to be gratified by the outpouring of affection for her husband. "I'm very touched by it; it's very comforting."
The two met in 1979; she was an administrative assistant in the summer session office working on her MBA degree and he was an associate professor, already a highly acclaimed scholar of labor relations who played a key role in establishing the Rutgers School of Business in Camden.
"I was definitely aware of her presence on campus — I knew she was there," Coleman said in an interview shortly before his death.
Their first date came in 1982: a presentation by the Philadelphia ensemble Pro Musica of "The Messiah" at the Methodist Church in Haddonfield. The choice of performance reflected the academics' mutual love of the arts, including theater, opera, orchestra — if it was music, Charlie and Nancy were there. As an expression of that passion, the couple endowed the Gulick/Coleman Scholarship. Now in existence for more than 10 years, the award has gone to a Rutgers student majoring in musical theater or theater arts who has performed in, or assisted with, Rutgers-Camden theater productions. More recently, it has expanded to encompass a greater range of students. (The family has requested donations to the fund as a memorial for Coleman.)
Early on, the age difference between the two academics proved unsettling for Coleman, he acknowledged.
"It took a long time for me to adjust to this younger woman. I had to accept the fact that I could be in love with a woman 17 years younger than me, and that, strangely enough, she could love me back," he said.
They publicly professed that love before God and dear ones — many of them Rutgers colleagues, of course — on Nov. 18, 1983, in a ceremony presided over by Thomas J. Venables, director of the summer session at on Rutgers' Camden Campus and a Methodist minister.
Both had children from previous marriages; his were grown, Nancy's daughter was 6. One biological son and six grandchildren would eventually round out the blended family tree.
Several years later, Gulick and Coleman renewed their vows. Once again Venables officiated, this time joined by Father Pat Lavin, a former chaplain on the Camden Campus.
SOURCE: RUTGERS FOCUS
