Love Stories: Wally and Carol Kolek

Danbury Patch introduces a new weekly series, Love Stories, which will appear every Thursday.  If you have a wonderful story of how you and your spouse met, and would like to share it with us, write to Christine Rose and she will contact you for more information.

Carol and Wally Kolek have lived in Danbury for 32 years. They met at a party in college in 1964, at a time when Carol was dating someone else. But as soon as she met Wally, she went home and wrote the other guy a Dear John letter.

 “Is that right?” asked Wally. “I didn't know that.” Carol smiled a secretive smile.

“Carol's father told Carol that we would never work out,"Wally said. "And we have been married for forty-five years. We didn't find out until ten years later, that Carol's grandfather said the same thing to her father when he proposed to her mother.”

"He was so serious when he said that to us, and it turned out he was kind of joking," explained Wally.

“There was another funny thing, we were going to get married,” Carol said. “But Wally received a draft notice to go to Vietnam, so we decided we should get married right away. We moved the date, and my uncle got Wally in the National Guard so he wouldn't have to leave.”

“I think of him every day of my life, how he kept pushing me and pushing me,” Wally said. “I see so many kids going off to war, and I think, he saved my life.”

“Then, on our wedding day,” continued Carol, “We got another letter, just like the other one, signed by the President, saying to disregard the first notice.”

Carol stayed home and raised their three children, and didn't start working in marketing until they were all grown. "I respect her so much for that," Wally said.  "The kids respect her, too.  She gave up a lot for them, and for me, too."

They have two sons and a daughter and three grandkids, and their youngest child is getting married in October.  

Wally had a corporate job until he retired, and has been a working photographer since then. “I worked for IBM thirty-seven years, and photography was a hobby since I was 17. When I retired, I went forward and never looked back. I do family portraits, business portraits, large architectural shoots. I even catalogue possessions of the rich and famous. It's cheaper to hire a photographer for three days than assessors. I used to say I would shoot anything but weddings, but now I do them, too.”

How did they know they were right for each other? Wally asked, “We knew pretty quickly. It just clicked.”

He looked at Carol and they smiled, and Wally said, “We still click.”