Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Love lost becomes love found, finally

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Aug. 21, 1998 | 9:34 a.m.

"I FIRST SAW Hazel Buckner in 1969 at Royal Oak Dondero High School in Royal Oak, Mich. I was 17 and she was 15. There was an immediately attraction on my part, but she never knew I was alive."

So began a tale that, nearly 30 years later, finds me sitting in the Reserve casino's coffee shop across from Greg Pendergrast of Royal Oak, Mich., author of the e-mail quoted above. It's a story of love found and lost, time lapsed, distances crossed and the Internet. And it's a story of coming full circle, too. Because the mid-40s looker sitting next to Greg is, at long last, Hazel.

Greg, a manager for a long-distance service, appears to have gotten over the guardedness of his youth -- the son of a wandering construction worker, he attended 11 schools. Then, he couldn't bring himself to admit his feelings to Hazel. But it's not entirely true that she didn't know he was alive. "I knew he had a crush on me," Hazel recalls.

So she asked him to escort her to a friend's wedding, after which they dated -- just not for long.

"I never knew what happened," Hazel says. For reasons having to do with the tangled circuitry of young manhood, "my immaturity broke us apart after a very short time," Greg admits in his e-mail. They last saw each other in 1974. Which is where this story really begins.

Because they never forgot one another. Not through his 15-year first marriage, nor his seven-year second. Not through her 17-year marriage. Not when she moved a few years ago to Las Vegas, where she manages a doctor's office.

Greg looked for Hazel. Checked the records at the county courthouse. Drove by her mother's house. Scanned Internet directories. No luck.

Hazel did find Greg once. A friend at a Michigan utility company pulled his records, found his number. With Hazel on the other line, the friend dialed. There was a woman's voice on the answering machine. Oh, he must be married.

Recently, a friend of Hazel's came across an e-mail address for a Greg Pendergrast. So it was that on July 9 a message blinked onto his screen, asking if he was the same Greg Pendergrast ... "I had cold chills," he says. "The feelings came back when I saw that e-mail."

They began a tentative Internet and phone relationship, although it didn't remain tentative long. They've been spending hours on the phone. The distance actually helped their developing romance, they say. By phone and Internet, they got to know each other without the awkwardness of proximity. "I fell in love with his writing," Hazel says. "He's exactly like his letters."

They arranged to meet last week. Was he nervous? "I tried to talk the pilot into turning around," Greg says. Was she nervous? "I was nervous," Hazel says. In the McCarran terminal, he instantly picked her out from the crowd, although the long, dark hair he remembered from high school is now shorter and blondish. "It was all I could do to blink 'em back," he says.

So, how are they doing? Just fine. "This is probably the farthest we've been apart," Greg says of the inches between them in the coffee shop. Their families are naturally wary -- this is so out of the ordinary. No matter. Together they've golfed, done the town, finally enjoying each other's company after all these years.

Their joint future is problematic; both have deep roots in their own towns. But they're sure things will work out. "I can't see the rest of my life without her in it," he says.