Love Story: James and Kaye Copper, N. Babylon

James and Kaye Copper of North Babylon celebrated their 65th anniversary this year. James recalls how they fell in love by mail during World War II.

Kaye and I met at a dance at the Polish National Hall in New Hyde Park in 1941.

I hadn't been to the hall in years. I was there with two other guys and we were dancing and mixing it up with a group of six girls, including Kaye. She was 16 and I was 20. Her older sister was there to chaperone. I thought Kaye was gorgeous, a beautiful young woman. We took their names and addresses.

The girls had taken the bus to the dance from Garden City Park. I lived in Hempstead and was the only one with a driver's license and a car, so I offered to take everyone home. We fit nine people into the car, something you couldn't get away with today. One of the other guys started dating Kaye, and I dated her best friend for about eight months.

When war broke out I was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force and sent to the South Pacific as crew chief on a B24 bomber for two and a half years. Kaye's friend wrote to me, and I would occasionally get letters from Kaye. Then Kaye's friend got married, and I asked Kaye to keep in contact with me.

By then Kaye was working at Grumman Corp. and wasn't dating anyone. Somehow, over the next two years, a loving relationship, then a true romance, developed through those letters. We couldn't wait for the war to end so we could be together.

On Nov. 20, 1945, four weeks after I was discharged, we were married. It wasn't a big wedding, just family. I was Protestant and Kaye was Catholic, so we got married at the rectory. We didn't have much money, so we spent our honeymoon locally, at the Garden City Hotel.

We have two children, one grandson and four great-grandchildren.

I retired from Grumman in 1982 after 32 years as a template maker. When the war ended, Kaye was laid off from her job at Grumman, as were the other women, and worked for a short time at Doubleday. She was a full-time homemaker until the children were older, and then drove a school bus for 25 years.