Gloria's Song

Gloria and I met in prison.     Actually we met at Florida State Prison – FSP as it is affectionately known – where the most infamous and dangerous men in the Florida correctional system are confined because they are either a security risk or they are condemned to die by lethal injection.      Gloria worked there, I was working there.      She was an attractive and single secretary working in the education department.      I was there auditing the records of the prison in the fall of 1972.   My work kept me busy, but I could not help but notice her coming through the interior gates of the prison.     She didn’t work around me; her office was deep inside the prison.     I remember clearly the day a sweet little lady named Nita broke my train of thought as I was pouring over some mundane records.      

She said, “Jerry, I want to introduce you to someone.”

There’s a matchmaker in every crowd, isn’t there?   She reached into the hallway and pulled my future bride into my field of view.  

It was her blue eyes.    Jason, John and Amberlyn have her eyes.    They were the first thing I noticed, followed by her captivating grin and her height.       She was really tall, but so am I therefore this was a wonderful thing.        I don’t know what her reactions were as she gazed on me and we can’t ask her, but after Nita left us alone we talked for a while.        I found out the important thing – how to get to her house.     She lived with her mother and stepfather not far from the prison.        My job involved traveling from one auditing assignment to another and the prison audit generally kept us in the area for several months at a time.   I commuted seventy miles a day from Gainesville to that assignment and when we wrapped it up I kept on commuting to Gloria’s house to see her.       I almost went through a set of tires while we dated.  

Our first date was watching the Super Bowl, one of those in the single digits, with the cheap-er commercials.     I don’t remember who won the game.    I was too busy watching her.    I kept working at FSP, trying to drag out the work and we kept dating.    We really hit it off.   Driving home late at night and spending time with Gloria after work almost daily made it hard to get up the next morning and do it all over again, yet she was worth every mile, worth every hour of lost sleep.     We dated for six months and got married.    A friend of the family who was a Justice of the Peace married us in the home of one of Gloria’s aunts.    It was a small gathering of mostly family and a few friends from work.   

Something good happened to us two months before our wedding.   It reminded me of the attorney who was a thorn in the side of the railroad.    He was a train chaser, not an ambulance chaser.  This lawyer would provide legal representation for the families of victims who had been killed at rail crossings by trains.     He was most successful to the chagrin of the railroad executives.    The awards he garnered were killing them.    So what did they do?     Yep, they hired him and gave him a desk job making a ton of money.      A similar thing happened to me, except for the part about the ton of money.     Shortly before Gloria and I got married, the prison system offered me an accounting job and I accepted.    Not only did I receive a pay raise, they also provided a house on the grounds for us.      The rent and utility charge was miniscule, something like $10 every two weeks.    This relocation would solve the long daily drive for me.      After a short honeymoon, we set up housekeeping on the prison grounds.    I settled into my new job and got a promotion in the first month.    At that rate I would be in charge of something within a year, I thought.