The happy {Trinity} couple

Five pairs reminisce about Bantam bonds

By Rhea Hirshman

On the weekend of his 40th Trinity Reunion, David Booth Beers ’77 rode his bicycle the four miles from his West Hartford home to the Friday evening clambake. Recently divorced and feeling “not very happy,” he sat down to chat with Marian Kuhn ’77, with whom he had remained in touch and saw every five years at Reunion. “She was very kind,” David remembers. “I wound up blurting out to her, ‘I had a wicked crush on you back then!’ and she told me she had had no idea! I understood. We lived in adjacent dorms our first year and were sort of friendly. But I was young for my age, and Marian had been educated in Europe and was not interested in freshman boys.”

However, “24 hours of anxiety later”—the next evening after the Reunion dinner—when David declared that he didn’t want to wait another five years to ask her out for coffee, Marian, who was widowed, countered with an invitation to a hike near her home in Salisbury, Connecticut.

From then on, they saw each other every weekend. Marian’s sisters urged her on. Five weeks after Reunion, they were engaged. They married the following spring. “At our age,” Marian says, “when you know, you know. You don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

According to Trinity’s Alumni Relations Office, Marian and David are just one couple of more than 1,000 Trinity pairs. Just a few years before their time at Trinity, the College was a very different place for women as the all-male undergraduate student body was on the verge of a major shift. Margot Clement Clark ’71, then a student at Vassar College, decided to become one of 16 female exchange students for the second semester of her sophomore year. “In many ways,” Margot says, “the College as an institution was not adequately prepared for women.” Still, her own experience was so positive and she found the students so welcoming that she decided to transfer to Trinity when the College opened to women in fall 1969.

Part of that positive experience was meeting Jeff Clark ’71. “We remember exactly where we were when we first met,” Jeff says. “We were on the Long Walk, with my roommate talking to Margot’s friend and me in the background.” Eventually, they began hanging out as friends, becoming a couple later that spring after Jeff asked Margot to his fraternity’s spring party. “I showed up at Margot’s door sporting a double-breasted navy-blue blazer I had bought at a thrift shop, with a silver medal around my neck that I had won in a crew competition that morning,” Jeff says. “And that,” Margot says, “is when I thought, ‘Well! OK!’ ”

They corresponded over the summer and by the following fall acknowledged their strong connection. After graduation and then two years of commuting, with Jeff in graduate school at Cornell University and Margot in graduate school at Simmons College, Margot said to Jeff, “We’re happy. Our parents are happy. Nothing is standing in our way.” Jeff adds, “Everything fit into place for us to get married.” In June 1973, they did.

While Margot and Jeff connected through mutual friends—a common story on a college campus—Marnie Richards Glazier ’96, M’02 and John Glazier IDP’02 found themselves working together at Timothy’s, a Zion Street restaurant that was, for decades, a Trinity institution. Marnie, who came to Trinity as junior, began working at Timothy’s during her senior year after she returned from the College’s summer program in Rome and moved into an apartment above the restaurant. John joined Timothy’s staff a few months later, shortly before beginning Trinity’s IDP program, and moved into an apartment across the hall. (“I told him I thought it was haunted,” Marnie says, “and he—unlike the others I’d told—took me seriously.”)

They started walking their dogs together, began dating that winter, and married in February 1998 while John was still an IDP student and Marnie was in her graduate program. By the time they both graduated in 2002, they had two young children. John was a familiar sight on campus, wearing a baby in a backpack (referred to by students as “backpack baby”) and often walking two dogs.

“Trinity was home to us and our family for quite a few years,” Marnie says. They had their wedding in the College Chapel and their reception in the Smith House, catered by Timothy’s. John notes, “We had the wedding on campus partly because of our friendship with Steven Charleston, the chaplain at the time.” John’s father, William S. Glazer II ’48, an Episcopal priest, also officiated.

“The Chapel has always been a special place for us,” Marnie says. “Both of our sons were baptized there, and we often spent quiet time together in the Chapel gardens before we were married.”

Marcus Halley, the College’s current chaplain, has witnessed the significance of the Chapel in couples’ lives. “Whenever a couple who were married here returns—for a visit or to renew their vows—they seem to be transported back to the day they were married,” he says. “I’ve seen this happen over and over. I imagine that the act of remembering that day also means remembering the journey of their lives together. I think a place like Trinity’s Chapel helps people find perspective about the highs and lows and walk away with a bit more joy.”

A different kind of special place factors into the story of Lacey Rose ’10 and Carly Bernstein Rose ’13. They had their “first real date” in Fenway Park at a Red Sox game in 2010. Lacey says, “Sometimes, in college, you’re not sure if you’re just hanging out or dating. But once we were both back home for the summer and removed from the college environment, we realized there was something more.”

The two were acquainted in middle school and high school and knew each other’s families but were surprised to run into each other on the Trinity campus when Carly arrived as a first-year during Lacey’s senior year. “I got a crush on a girl for the first time,” Carly says, “and Lacey was one of very few gay people out on campus, so I reached out to her.” By late spring, they had become very close. “I thought she was the one after a month of spending time with her,” Carly says. But Lacey was more cautious.

“I didn’t think it made sense for us to try to be together long distance while she was in college and I stayed in D.C. for several years. During that time apart, we both established our careers. We dated other people. But, when we were together, it always felt like home.”

In 2019, when Lacey moved back to the Boston area, they reunited, and, in August 2020, she proposed to Carly—at Fenway Park. Lacey had cold-emailed Sam Kennedy ’95, Red Sox president and CEO, asking to have the park for an hour so she could propose to Carly on the field. Kennedy sent his assistant to set up, and Lacey hired the Red Sox photographer. Carly said yes, and they married in August 2022.

Elizabeth Lyra Ross Norman ’74 was not expecting to meet her future husband when she rushed straight from a job interview into a panel discussion with Trinity’s Board of Fellows in February of her senior year. According to Norman, the board had invited all Black students to discuss how the College could better serve their needs, and the meeting’s chair was John C. Norman ’62, the only Black member of the panel, the only Black member of his class, and one of only six Black students at Trinity at the time.

“Some of the students’ demands were totally unrealistic, and I was concerned that they would just be written off,” Elizabeth says. She knew something about negotiating because her mother, an educator, was the union negotiator for the school system where she worked, and her father, who worked for Ford Motor Company, was very active in the UAW. “So I wound up as the arbitrator, talking a lot and helping the students make suggestions that could actually be implemented.”

John took notice; they talked after the meeting and began dating shortly thereafter. Not wanting to get in the way of each other’s careers—hers as an opera singer (involving frequent travel) and his in education administration—they often were separated, although never for longer than six weeks. “We finally decided that we could have our careers and be married,” Elizabeth says. “We married in 1991 after one of the longest courtships in history.”

Halley notes that marriage is a journey that is not easily mapped out from the start. “The traditional vows have the two individuals promising to stay ‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.’ Couples will need all the help they can muster to keep these promises,” he says. “Life is endlessly unpredictable, and if you want to remain married through all the ups and downs, you need to choose someone who can go through all of that uncertainty with you.

“I love weddings,” he adds. “I think they’re a balm for a world that could always use more love.”

 

Did you find your forever person ’neath the elms, or did you marry a Bantam later in life? Please email your love story to [email protected] for possible publication in a future issue.

 

Header Photo by Billie Weiss; Lacey Rose ’10 proposes to Carly Bernstein ’13 at Fenway Park in August 2020. The extraordinary setting was facilitated by Sam Kennedy ’95, president and CEO of the Boston Red Sox.