A chance meeting in France during World War II led to 61-year love story

On the table in front of her were two framed pictures, a map of France and a miniature Eiffel Tower. The sunlight filtered through the window in her room and fell softly across her face. She is wearing an aqua blue button down shirt and a cream colored jacket with miniature baseballs as buttons down the front, a miniature bat pinned and the red laces of a ball embroidered into the jacket. She spoke to me with a French accent still strong, even though she left France nearly 80 years ago for America. Her name is Yvette Haney. She is 101 years old. In one picture is a G.I. His name is Owen. He is dressed in his United States Army uniform. The other framed image is a wedding picture. The bride is breathtakingly beautiful and the groom is Hollywood handsome. It's Yvette and Owen. The Eiffel Tower is a reminder of Paris. The city of love. A love story Snow fell that day in January 1945. It was the worst winter Lyon, France, had seen in a very long time. The wind was severe and temperatures were dangerous. "Maybe I would have been bundled more if things had been normal," Yvette said to me. Nothing was normal. World War II was in its sixth year. "Textiles were rationed," Yvette said. "You weren't allowed to buy clothes. I had a normal coat, not a long one and I don't remember having a hat." It was lunchtime and Yvette was working in Lyon, the second largest city in France, at a small publication company that created content for kids. She was 20 years old, nearly a kid herself. Yvette was walking back to work and as she walked down the busy sidewalk along the big avenue in the heart of the city, a young man in uniform was walking up it. "Our eyes met," she said. "He went by me but turned around and came right back. He asked me if I could help him with directions to a restaurant?" I chuckled and told her he was just looking for a reason to talk to her. "No, no, no," she insisted. "It was plausible. "Everything was Russian and anything good could only be gotten through the black market. You couldn't go into a restaurant unless you had tickets. They wouldn't serve the French at a nice restaurant without tickets. You needed a ticket for meat, a ticket for bread, for butter," she said as she counted each on her fingertips, "and a ticket for whatever vegetable was popular that week." The G.I. was Owen Haney, an American in General George S. Patton's Third Army. He was an engineer in the Army sent to France to rebuild the Bridges of Lyon. He was on a furlough. He said to Yvette, "you can be my guide tonight and you can be my guest." Yvette clapped her hands in front of her face and said to me, "and that is how I met him, right there on the street." Owen Haney was 21 years old when they met. He was born in 1923 on a farm in Nebraska but when his family farm dried up, his parents moved to Cleveland for work. Yvette was from L'Arbresle, France, a small town of meadows and flowers 29 kilometers northwest of Lyon. Everyone, including the priests, rode their bikes in L'Arbresle. Only the doctors and very wealthy had cars. A young man in uniform "I thought, 'Oh, how nice he is,'" Yvette said, "and I thought, I'm going to be able to eat good tonight." Food was not easy to find in France during World War II. The Germans had seized production and ration tickets were more valuable than money; both were scarce. "Yes, I found him good looking," Yvette said. "I thought, he's just lonesome and he wants to eat and he wants to spend time. That's OK." Yvette and Owen found an old French restaurant that didn't look like a restaurant and had dinner. "I was worried it was a black market restaurant," she said. "They weren't allowed but they existed and you had to know someone or get introduced by somebody to get in." Yvette took the bus home that night and thought about her American G.I. "We had already set a date for the next night," she said with a soft smile. They went back to the same restaurant. "The food was so good," she said. I asked if she remembered what they ate? "Anything," Yvette said. "Anything because we were so starved. Anything tasted good." For three straight late afternoons, as Yvette would get off work, they'd meet for dinner and they would talk. "I was worried that my English wasn't good enough and if I didn't understand him, I didn't want to tell him that I didn't understand him." Yvette spoke four languages — French, English, Latin and Greek. She was intrigued by him and he fell in love with her at first sight. "That very first dinner, he started talking about our future," squeezing her eyes and wrinkling her forehead as she relived the moment, "That was the first night, yes, and then the next two days, same thing." When did you fall in love with him? "After he left," Yvette said. "I asked myself if I should hold him back and I thought there must be a way to keep him. I was upset. I cannot let him go. I cannot let him go and that is when I realized I was in love. When he left, I was hoping I'd see him again and we'd get married." Owen's three-day furlough from the United States Army was over and he went back to his unit. "I didn't know where he was, they were not allowed to tell," she said. "He sent me a picture and we started exchanging mail sometimes few and far between because of the war." Yvette wrote in pretty cursive and Owen printed. For two years they wrote. They never saw each other. "I miss you. I miss you. I miss you," she said he wrote. "There was a lot of that." There were times, in their two-year correspondence, Yvette would wait a month for a new letter and that made her feel anxious. "I was praying. I was so sure he would never come back. I was so sure." France was liberated from Nazi Germany in the summer of 1944 but the war continued in Europe until the spring of 1945. Owen went back to the United States and was still in the Army "because there was unfinished business," Yvette said. Owen was to be deployed to the Pacific but was never sent. He kept writing to Yvette that they would be married. "One day, I received a very big envelope in the mail," Yvette said, "with all kinds of documents to read. They were documents I had to fill out to get married." One problem Yvette's parents knew nothing of her letter writing romance with an American soldier. "I had to confess to my parents about the whole thing. I had never told them," she said. They knew nothing. They were shocked. They were heartbroken and it was difficult for me but I couldn't change my mind because that is what I wanted. That is what I wanted. When you are in love you know you just can't live without him." Yvette's father was closed mouth about the revelation of his one and only daughter. "I had conversations with my mother about my decision," Yvette said. "I knew she had met my father during World War I and I felt she could relate my story with her story, maybe." Yvette's parents, Paul and Antoinette, grew up in villages close to each other in France. Paul served in the French Army and was wounded twice. Antoinette was 21 when she married. Yvette started her journey to the United States in January 1947. She took a six-hour train ride from Lyon to Paris. She took a four-hour train ride from Paris to Cherbourg Harbour. Cherbourg Harbour was a key port along France's Normandy coast and was a top strategic acquisition for the Allies shortly after the D-Day invasions. German troops destroyed the Harbour per Hitler's orders, before retreating, leaving nothing but ruins that took years to fully rebuild. "The harbour was still cluttered with debris from the war," Yvette said, "so the ship I was to get on to travel to New York could not go into the harbor. We had to go on a little boat (to get to the ship). I was so scared. In the dark of the night we could see the lights of the ship far away on the high sea and we were in this little tiny boat and we were tossed around and we had to get on the ship on a little bridge that was swinging back and forth and below us was that black water all around." The ship was the SS America, pride of the United States ship line. It served troops during World War II as the USS West Point. It took six days to get to New York. "I was seasick for six days," Yvette said. "Oh, that was some experience." Owen was waiting for Yvette when she got off the ship in New York. Wedding bells They had not seen each other since those three days in Lyon, France, two years before, but in just over two weeks, they would be married. Yvette and Owen took a 13-hour train to Cleveland and arrived at the Terminal Tower just before midnight. Yvette stayed with Owen's sister, Mary. The very next morning she met Owen's parents. "I was very nervous. I was not Irish," she said. "His mother was an Irish immigrant and his father was a first generation Irish-American. His two sisters were married to good Irish boys." Yvette arrived in America as a tourist instead of an immigrant because "if I came as a tourist and wanted to stay I'd have to get married within six months. I could not come as an immigrant because I would have to wait in France and it may have taken years.'' Yvette and Owen married Feb. 15, 1947. "I remember the night before the wedding, he put a really nice little cross on me and I was so touched," she said. "I thought it must be a wedding tradition but it turned out it was a Valentine's Day present. I knew nothing about Valentine's Day." Yvette's family could not make the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to attend her wedding but her father sent a special gift: her wedding dress. "We could not find the fabric for my wedding dress so my father went to the black market. He had connections in the black market in France and he bought the fabric for my wedding dress with bottles of French wine," she said. "I don't know how he got the wine. I'm sure it was quite a bit and I'm sure he had to go through some other deal but that's the way life was right after the war." He made a deal with a seamstress to make the dress. Yvette's father worked one more deal. He had a carpenter custom make a wooden trunk to keep the dress safe as it was shipped to America. She still has her dress. Yvette was given in marriage by one of Owen's Irish uncles. The ceremony was held in St. Ignatius of Antioch Church on Cleveland's west side. Baseball In 1948, Yvette became a fan of the Cleveland Indians. "Oh, I love baseball. I learned baseball from listening to Jimmy Dudley," she said. Dudley was the Indians radio play-by-play voice from 1948 to 1968. He was recognized by the Baseball Hall of Fame. "In 1954, we were so sure we were going to win the World Series." The Indians had set an American League record for wins in a season with 111. Yvette was a finalist in the 1954 Cleveland Press Miss World Series contest. She and 21 others posed in bathing suits for a Press photo. Unfortunately, the Indians were swept in the World Series by the New York Giants in four games. "I was mad," she said. "Oh, I was so mad. I didn't watch baseball for 50 years but I started again with the new stadium. It sounded interesting so I got involved again and I'm very much involved now." Yvette listens to Tom Hamilton and Jim Rosenhaus now on the radio and the audio calls of Matt Underwood and Rick Manning on television. Like Jimmy Dudley, Hamilton was recognized by the Baseball Hall of Fame. Ten years ago, she started to lose her vision. The voices of Hamilton, Rosenhaus, Underwood and Manning are daily staples in her life each spring and summer. I'm sitting across the table from her and she can't see me. I'm just a blur. "It's very difficult but I've had good friends helping me every day. They have their own families but they help me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for my friends." Yvette is a member of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Avon Lake. Til death do us part Yvette and Owen moved to Avon Lake in 1956. She still lives in the house they made their home together. He worked at Ohio Bell and she worked at American Greetings for 42 years, from 1949 until she retired in 1991. Yvette and Owen were married for 61 years until he died in 2008. He was 85. They were never able to have children. "His passing was very, very hard," Yvette said. "His family adopted me and have always helped me. They are still today, always here for me if I need anything." It's been 18 years since her husband passed. Yvette holds the picture of them on their wedding day. "It's still hard," she said. "We were very happy. He would say, 'I don't love you, I adore you.' He always said that." If we could all be so lucky. Contact Ron Jantz at rjantz@chroniclet.com.