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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

In their 42 years, love has grown in Heaps


Karen and Steve Heaps take an afternoon stroll along the Centennial Trail on Thursday. After 42 years of marriage, they still hold hands in public and exchange poems. 
 (Liz Kishimoto / The Spokesman-Review)
Tom Lutey, staff writer The Spokesman-Review

Love may not be blind, but in the case of Steve and Karen Heaps, it is surely double-visioned.

Take the conflicting stories of their courtship, for example. It’s the best of the long-lasting love stories told by readers contacted by Exit 289 over the past week. Theirs, and one other, follow.

“We were Shadle kids. I was 17. She was 15,” Steve Heaps said. It was 1961. “She lived three blocks from me, and I didn’t know it until I saw her on Rowan Hill,” he said. “I waved at her, and she waved back.”

Steve was with Mike Gee. Gee had taken Karen out for a Coke once, and he gave her telephone number to Heaps, who called her up faster than you can say “sweet baby.”

“I told her I was the guy who waved at her,” Steve says of that first introduction, which is where his and Karen’s story start to differ.

Steve portrays himself as an unknown in need of an introduction. Karen Heaps says Steve was “the biggest jock at Shadle,” a track star, a real hunk.

The date went off like this: Steve says he picked Karen up and hurried off to “Splendor in the Grass,” starring Natalie Wood, the 1961 story of a young Kansas girl’s unrequited and forbidden love with a handsome man from a powerful family. The movie’s tagline: “There’s a miracle in being young and … a fear.”

Karen doesn’t remember their first movie; there were so many movies, after all. What she remembers is Steve walking into the front room to meet her parents, who were talking with a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. Steve mistook the salesman for Karen’s father and expended most of his energy making a lasting impression on a stranger.

The part Karen remembers most, though, is the way Steve shrugged it off when Karen’s infant nephew burped up on Steve’s shirt.

“A guy who goes over and picks up a baby, he likes kids, and he didn’t mind the burp,” Karen said. “That was kind of the spark right there.” She chose well.

They eloped three years later, when Steve was 20 and Karen was 18. Washington wouldn’t allow a man under 21 to marry, so they headed for a Presbyterian church in Coeur d’Alene.

Kids, the reverend told them, you need a blood test. They never even thought about that. Steve passed out at the sight of the needle, but they thought they were ready and returned to the church to be married that day.

When they returned to Spokane and told Karen’s folks the news, the parents weren’t surprised. In fact, Steve remembers Karen’s brother disappearing upstairs and returning with a wedding present already wrapped.

The newlyweds moved to California, where Karen raised two kids while Steve worked a night bakery job and went to school in the daytime. It wasn’t easy. Marriage rarely is, but it was special. Out of the blue, Steve would come home with flowers and, occasionally, a poem, beautiful poems about the day they met and what Karen meant to him.

The latest poem he wrote her was delivered Christmas Day 2005 and read aloud before their children and their grandchildren. They’ve been married 42 years, and there’s really no secret to it, Karen said. They didn’t do anything special; they just did everything together.

That’s different from the way Dave Gnotta’s relationship with his future wife began.

Initially, Dave and Silvia just did lunch. They were newspaper employees at the Orange County Register outside Los Angeles. Dave was a 21-year-old working as a typesetter; Silvia was 34, part of the Register’s accounting pool.

“She was this great-looking gal,” Dave said. And she wasn’t interested in dating a kid, as one of Dave’s friends quickly learned after hustling Silvia in the company lunchroom. The not-so-suave Dave just settled for lunch. Nothing wrong about lunch with a beautiful girl. Silvia wasn’t just gorgeous, she was worldly, an immigrant from Berlin who was downright cosmopolitan compared to Dave, who grew up in a rural suburb of Santa Ana, Calif.

Dave moved on to a better job with a tool company, but the lunches continued. Each day he and Silvia would meet somewhere with their brown bags. Then one day outside a deli in Santa Ana, just after Silvia had gotten in her car to return to work, Dave leaned in the window and kissed her right on the lips.

“She was a little surprised,” Dave said. “She didn’t pull back or anything like that, but she was surprised. I said, ‘You realize now that I have to marry you.’ She said, “You’re crazy.’ “

And Silvia kept calling her young boyfriend crazy right up until the day they got married. As Dave tells it, standing at the front of the church and seeing Silvia walk up the aisle was like “watching the cowardly lion going to see the wizard of Oz.”

“Her hands were shaking, and her eyes were darting from side to side,” he said. “I thought she was looking for a window to jump out of.”

But Silvia didn’t jump out the window, though Dave said it took a couple of years of convincing her they were doing the right thing, even after they were married.

“I think we worked through those things together,” Dave said. “I think the act of working through those things brought us closer and closer. We’re really happy.”

Yet after 28 years of marriage, some things haven’t changed. Silvia still gets embarrassed when Dave kisses her in public. And yes, they still eat lunch together every day.