Love Stories

BY SANDRA SNYDER ssnyder@leader.net
Tuesday, February 08, 2000     Page: 3

It changes everything and stops at nothing. And in the end, it lasts. It’s
love. As Valentine’s Day approaches, six area couples, married from five years
to almost 65, talk of the ties that bind them heart to heart.
   
`She picked me up’ Before he was an arena boss, `Mr. Handy Andy’ scored one
for romance
   
Des Moines, Iowa. The Fourth of July 1990. An apartment-complex pool. He’s
sitting coolly – on a lawn chair – in the shallow end, wearing a bright green
shirt and blue zinc oxide on his nose. She walks over to him with a simple
question: Where are the good fireworks? He humiliates her in front of a pile
of people. “Disneyland,” comes his one-word, smart-aleck reply. The place
breaks up in laughter. That day, Karen Van Riessen thought Andy Long was, in
a word, a jerk. Andy Long, though, thought Karen Van Riessen had nice eyes.
She was wearing a bikini, but he insists he was attracted to her eyes. Funny
that “fireworks” would be the word to begin Karen and Andy’s first
conversation. While fire lighted the skies over Iowa and the rest of America
that holiday, sparks went off inside Andy’s saucy soul. He might have had a
funny way of showing it, but Andy did like Karen, and he would bring himself
to admit it. Three years after that first poolside meeting, Andy married
Karen, and they settled down to begin a life together that so far has involved
at least three states. Mountaintop, Pa. – Walden Park, Wright Township, to be
exact – is now the place Andy, 35, Karen, 32, daughter Samantha, 3, and dog
Sherman call home. For Andy, executive director of Luzerne County’s newest
baby, the First Union Arena at Casey Plaza, the most recent relocation from
Mount Pleasant, S.C., was a no-brainer. The former promoter for Ringling Bros.
and Barnum & Bailey Circus always knew he wanted to become an arena director,
and Wilkes-Barre, Pa., sounded good to him. It was fine by Karen, too, and her
openness to change is one of the things he loves best about her. “We just
fit well. That’s the coolest part,” he said. “The fact that she’s put up
with all the adventures we’ve followed here …” Those adventures began, to
be sure, at the Iowa apartment complex, and only on certain points do Andy and
Karen agree. “She picked me up,” Andy declared last week as he sat across a
table from his wife inside his cozy arena office. Karen just laughed, then
recalled that bright green shirt and blue sun protection. “I always say,
`Would you be attracted to that person?’ ” she said. But he was quick on the
uptake: “And I always ask, `Why would you even engage that person in
conversation?’ ” OK, so they engaged each other in conversation that fateful
day. There must have been no hard feelings because, later that same evening,
Andy and his friend and Karen and her friend – Kramer, whom she had known
since high school – wound up in her apartment. He sat on a La-Z-Boy, pulled
out her yearbook and started reading, aloud, a letter from an old boyfriend.
“Another attempt to humiliate me,” she was quick to explain. Before that
evening, which also included dancing, was out, Andy pretended to have enjoyed
Karen’s and Kramer’s company so much he asked Kramer for their phone numbers.
“Needless to say, I threw Kramer’s away,” he remembered. A week later, he
called her and set up their first official date. “She said yes for some
reason,” he recalled, adding, with a sarcastic grin, “She wasn’t, obviously,
attracted to me.” After accepting the invitation, however, Karen tried to
“get out of” the first date, calling from the mall where she worked to say
her car had died, Andy noted. No such luck. “Being a good Iowa boy,” he
said, “I had jumper cables.” “Of course, Mr. Handy Andy… ” Karen
inserted. So that first date finally did come off, notwithstanding dinner at
10:30 at night. Still, at evening’s end, Karen was less than impressed. “I
thought he was a smart aleck with no goals,” she said. “You should see the
bar he worked in. It was a total meat market.” At the time, Andy was indeed
a bartender, but what Karen knew little of were the circumstances that had
brought him to that point in his life. After working for Ringling Bros., he
had returned to Iowa to be with his father after the death of his mother. He
took the bar job to tide him over until his next big thing. He did tell Karen
where he had worked, but she found it difficult to believe him. At the end of
the evening, she even stood a mile away to avoid a kiss. “So I gave her a
hug,” he said with a shrug. Yet she agreed to see him again, and their first
romantic date involved a Harry Connick Jr. concert. The kiss, by the way, came
on the third date. Two months later, something else came for Andy: a job
offer from Ogden Entertainment in Dayton, Ohio, a 12-hour-drive from their
residences in Iowa. He took it, of course, and she eventually moved to a
small town in Indiana. They still dated, via phone and weekend visits, for two
years. She later returned to Iowa to the life she missed, and not long after
so did he – to become a marketing director at Iowa State University, his alma
mater. Back in Iowa, Karen remembered, she figured it was time for an
ultimatum. Last week, as she recounted her thinking in the areas of love,
marriage and requesting a commitment back then, he interjected, in classic
Andy style: “Hey, don’t let her be so bossy!” In one matter, she would be
insistent, though, she remembered. If Andy were to propose, she wanted the
question to come on bended knee. He complied. It was Christmastime in 1992,
and the two had planned to view a huge light display in Johnson, Iowa.
Beforehand, Andy had told one other person, someone he hardly knew, that he
was going to ask Karen to marry him that night. “Andy doesn’t get very
nervous about a lot of things, but, I’m telling you, this night he was
weird,” Karen remembered. After riding around Johnson for a while, the two
got out of their car to walk for a bit, and Andy was strangely quiet. Then he
just dropped to his knees in the middle of the street and proposed. She sat
on his knee, hugged him and said yes. Then they called her parents for
permission, something he actually had wanted to do even before he proposed.
Karen said her mother always loved Andy, and obtaining the approval was a
breeze. They married in September of ’93. In December, there would be another
move. Andy got a new job offer from Ogden, this time in Charleston, S.C. He
accepted, and the newlyweds packed up for the move, intending to stay “a
little while” before eventually moving back to the Midwest. They stayed more
than five years and even bought a house. Then they got word of a new arena
coming to Wilkes-Barre, and Andy couldn’t resist. “We were a little tired of
being hot anyway,” he said. “Now we’re a little tired of being cold.” The
air was considerably cold outside but the mood warm inside the arena last week
as Andy and Karen, now married six years, talked of what they love most about
their new home and each other. Karen, who had never been further northeast
than Warren, Ohio, especially likes Northeastern Pennsylvania’s proximity to
places such as New York City, Boston and Baltimore. She is already heavily
involved with the Welcome Wagon Club of Mountaintop and has joined two bunko
clubs. (Bunko is a dice game and a great “mindless release,” she said.) The
couple recently joined Christ United Methodist Church, and they send
precocious Samantha to preschool there. The neighbors also have made a good
impression. “This area has so much potential,” Andy said, adding of the
people of Mountaintop, “There’s a lot of forward-thinking people up there.”
All in all, Luzerne County is a good fit for two people who are small-towners
at heart but think big. “We both have similar backgrounds. We were both
raised in very Christian homes, conservative homes,” Karen said. “I don’t
think I could have met someone in Chicago or some place like that.” Then she
pointed out something that attracted her to Andy from the get-go. “His
personality and the way he carried himself …” she began. As mates often
do, he finished her sentence: “For a bartender, I was pretty confident.”