American Woman by Katie Rogers

Author:Katie Rogers [Rogers, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2024-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

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When Joe first met Neilia Hunter in the spring of 1964, he was a cocky junior at the University of Delaware. He had arrived on campus after overcoming a persistent childhood stutter and enduring years of bullying, and he was ready to reinvent himself. He was interested in becoming an attorney, but he spent his first several years trying to make the football team and chasing girls.

Joe was beginning to realize that he might need to get his act together and bring his grades up in time to apply for law school when he and a friend traveled to Nassau, the Bahamas, for spring break. Carrying just eighty-nine dollars from his tax refund, Joe had no idea where he was going to stay that evening. Luckily, the pair ran into some classmates who let them crash at their rental. Looking for action on Paradise Island, the pair snuck into the exclusive British Colonial Hotel. They found a couple of discarded resort towels, wrapped them around their waists, and acted like they belonged.

A pretty blonde was lounging by the pool. Neilia.

“When she turned toward me, I could see she had a beautiful smile and gorgeous green eyes,” Joe wrote in his memoir. “She was lit by the unforgiving glory of a full afternoon sun, and I couldn’t see a single flaw. Basically, I fell ass over tin cup in love—at first sight.”

He liked that she was easy to talk to. She liked it when he talked. Neilia was raised in Skaneateles, New York, and was a senior at Syracuse University. She had plans to teach at a nearby high school that fall. Her father owned the Hunter Dinerant in Auburn, and she spent her childhood summering along Skaneateles Lake in the Finger Lakes region. She had attended Penn Hall Junior College and Preparatory School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania. Athletic and graceful, Neilia came from a different background from the scrappy, working-class Joe.

According to Joe’s retelling, on the first day they met, she shrugged off a posh young suitor to go to dinner with Joe. It was a heavenly development, except for one snag: He only had seventeen dollars left to his name. Neilia, seeing him look panicked when the check arrived, slipped him cash to pay for dinner.

Neilia and Joe were inseparable for the four days they were together in Nassau. He loved talking to her, and she made him feel special. The young, swaggering Joe had decided before he left the island that he was not going to live without her.

“You know, we’re going to get married,” he told her, at the end of their trip.

“I think so,” she whispered back. “I think so.”

After their time in Nassau, the couple returned to their respective schools, and Joe began a commuting habit that stuck with him over the decades. He turned down a chance to take a spot on the University of Delaware football team and instead traveled hundreds of miles each weekend to visit Neilia in Syracuse.

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