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By Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com
As lovers across the San Fernando Valley celebrated Valentine’s Day on Friday, four local couples shared the unique stories of how they met.
Love was in the cards
The first time Carmen Manfredi saw Peggy Nielsen, she was playing the card game Canasta at the Joslyn Center in Burbank.
She was 78, he was 79.
For two months, Manfredi tried to score a date with her, but she wasn’t interested.
Her husband had died a few years earlier, and she wasn’t ready for romance.
But Manfredi wouldn’t give up.
"Sometimes my best friend was her partner in Canasta,” Manfredi said. “I said, ‘Put in a good word for me.’”
His affection for her was obvious.
“He kept moving closer and closer, and pretty soon, he was sitting next to me in Canasta,” Nielsen said. “I kept ignoring him.”
Finally, she agreed to go out with him, much to the surprise of her friends who called him a “ladies man.”
On their first date, they went to see the Western movie “Crazy Heart.”
With an hour and a half to kill before the show, Manfredi invited her over to see his Silver Winds apartment downtown. He put on some pretty music and asked her to dance.
During one Stacey Kent song, the lyrics of which go, “Isn’t it a pity we never met before?” the couple had their first kiss.
“He said, ‘We were meant to be together,’” Nielsen recalled. “After he kissed me, I agreed with him.”
Shortly after their third date to see the “Palm Springs Follies,” Manfredi, who had never been married before, knew he had finally found the one.
One morning at the Joslyn Center, he rushed her into the hallway where they were alone, and with tears in his eyes, he took her face in his hands.
“After 79 years, I found my soul mate,” he told her. “I can’t lose you.”
While Nielsen was enjoying dating him, she wasn’t entirely convinced.
“He said, ‘I have enough love for the both of us,’” she recalled. “Six months later, we were married.”
Nearly 100 people showed up to their wedding, at which Nielsen’s son and daughter were the best man and maid of honor, respectively.
In September, the couple will celebrate four years of marriage.
Eighty-two years
To woo the straight-haired blonde in his fifth-grade class, Harold Owings would bring her Baby Ruth candy bars every day.
Sometimes, he’d bring her two.
“She’s the only girl that really appealed to me when I first met her,” Owings said. “She was the only one that I even cared about.”
Less than a decade later, Harold and Edna Owings were married. And last November, the Burbank residents, 102 and 101 years old, respectively, celebrated their 82nd wedding anniversary.
The couple was honored this Valentine’s Day by the Worldwide Marriage Encounter for having the longest marriage in the United States, out of more than 300 nominations.
Their secret?
“We loved each other, we talked things out,” Edna Owings said. “We never thought of being mad at each other and arguing.”
The couple continues to keep busy. About once a month, they fly to Las Vegas and stay in the Palace Station Hotel to play the penny slot machines.
“We’re not high rollers,” Edna Owings said. “Money hasn’t been No. 1, love has been No. 1 — we’ve never wanted anything we cannot afford.”
They chose Vegas as their vacation spot in 1947, and have been visiting regularly ever since. In fact, they returned from their most recent Vegas trip last Friday.
“We are as much in love now as we were when we got married,” Edna Owings said.
A sound pairing
As a Disney employee in Burbank in 1977, Bill Cotter often took his lunch breaks in the sound stage to watch movies being filmed.
One day, he walked across the lot to watch the filming of “The North Avenue Irregulars.”
As he was telling his friend what the movie was about, a curly-haired woman named Carol Cook turned around and asked, “Wait, what’s the movie about?”
Assuming the woman was part of the film crew, Cotter was unimpressed.
“How on Earth could she be working on this thing and have no clue what she’s working on?” he thought. “Oh well, chalk that one off.”
The following week, he was surprised when he saw her using the copy machine near his office, far from the sound stage.
“Aren’t you a little lost from the sound stage?” he quipped.
She actually worked in the next building over, dubbing movies into foreign languages. Like him, she just enjoyed watching them shoot.
That’s when the light bulb went on in Cotter’s head — she wasn’t on the film crew.
Cotter never liked dating within the Disney family — he’d rather avoid awkward moments at work in case the relationship didn’t work out.
But for Cook, he was willing to take that risk.
And since she also worked at Disney, unlike other women he’d dated, she wouldn’t use him for free admission into Disneyland.
So he did a little research and found out she loved live shows.
On their first date, he took her to the Pantages Theatre to see “Hello, Dolly!” starring Carol Channing.
From then on, they’d spend weekday afternoons eating ice cream at Pollyanna’s house on the Disney lot, searching for old treasures and props that had been thrown out from movie sets, or walking up and down the street on which Zorro used to ride.
They dated for seven years before getting married in 1984.
Carol and Bill Cotter worked at Disney until 1990 to 1982, respectively, though Bill still does freelance work for the studio.
The pair was actually the brains behind this year’s Burbank Rose Float design, and their float design was picked again for next year.
Sunset romance
Burbank-native Toluca Scarfo noticed Luke Rivers while she was standing in the front row of the crowd at Whiskey A Go Go while his band “Stonehand” was performing.
The long-haired lead singer was shirtless, wearing tight gold pants, Doc Martin boots and a belt with a spider buckle. And he was wild on stage.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s kind of cute,’” Scarfo said.
At the time, however, Rivers was seeing someone else. The pair became friends after they kept running into each other at different shows on the Sunset Strip.
Shortly after, Rivers and his then-girlfriend broke up mid-2011, he asked Scarfo — via Facebook — to see the Tim Burton exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She said yes.
They hung out for three weeks straight, until Scarfo took a trip to Italy, which some would say was a test for their new relationship.
When she returned three weeks later, Rivers picked her up from the airport with a cardboard sign that read, “The most beautiful girl in the world.”
“He was waiting for me like nothing changed,” Scarfo said.
Two and a half years later, Rivers proposed on Christmas. He filmed all her family and friends holding signs that read: “Toluca” “we” “are” “your” “friends” “&” “family” “we” “love” “you” “but” “now” “might” “be” “a” “really” “good” “time” “to” “turn around.”
She did, and there Rivers was, with a ring.
He’d dreamt up the proposal idea just a month after they met.
Scarfo and Rivers are getting married on July 4 of next year.
“I want to call it our ‘Dependence Day,’” Rivers said.
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Follow Alene Tchekmedyian on Google+ and on Twitter: @atchek.