Love Story: Lillian and Lloyd Baum of Long Beach
Lloyd and Lillian Baum of Long Beach, who met on an Islanders road trip in 1974, are still fans of the team. Credit: Baum family
Lillian Baum of Long Beach explains how a rumor brought her and future husband Lloyd together.
In 1974, I was 23 years old and living with my family in Queens Village. We were all fans of the New York Islanders. My younger sister and I belonged to the NY Islanders Booster Club, which held social events and organized trips to out-of-town hockey games.
That March, my sister and her friends decided to sign up for the club’s bus trip to a game in Toronto. They’d be staying at a hotel in Buffalo. Somehow a rumor got started that if you were under 18 years of age, you needed a chaperone to cross the border into Canada. Since my sister and her friends were not yet 18, I was reluctantly drafted to accompany them by one friend’s mother. She met my objections to being a weekend babysitter by offering to pay for my trip.
I’m very happy she persuaded me to go, because one of the booster members on the bus was my future husband, Lloyd Baum.
When we got to Buffalo, some of the group went to Niagara Falls. I stayed behind with the rest of the group, including Lloyd, and we explored Buffalo. Lloyd and I started talking. He was 25 and lived in Hewlett. I told him how I came to be on the bus and he said that he decided at the last minute to take the trip.
By the time we got back home, Lloyd asked me for a date. I was seeing someone else at the time, so I turned him down. Several months later we were both at a Booster Club dance and he asked me out again. This time I said yes. Our first date was to see the movie “Blazing Saddles.” We continued dating and became engaged in June 1975.
Our wedding was on Dec. 7, 1975, at the Huntington Town House. My cousin put a miniature hockey player on top of the wedding cake! We honeymooned at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. We lived in Lynbrook, then moved to Long Beach in 1984.
Lloyd is an insurance specialist with a pension administration company in Lynbrook. I am a registered tax preparer and chartered financial consultant. I also volunteer for Literacy Nassau. We both perform with several community theater groups and sing in the choir at Temple Emanu-el of Long Beach.
Our 40th anniversary in 2015 was spent cruising around Hawaii with friends. To mark our 41st anniversary last year we spent a couple days in Manhattan and saw a Broadway show.
We remained Islanders season ticket holders for many years. Since our schedules limit our ability to attend games at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, we now enjoy watching the games on television. We will always look back fondly on our days with the Islanders. I still tease Lloyd that he owes me a trip back to Buffalo since we didn’t get to see Niagara Falls on our first visit.
— With Virginia Dunleavy
