Some might call it fate. Others may say it’s completely random. Either way, most everyone is drawn to stories of chance encounters – married couples who met at a party, best friends who started out with an impromptu conversation on a bus, colleagues turned close friends. By human nature, we desire to connect with ideas of fate, coincidental experiences, and stories of lives that intersect at just the right moment in time.
For one Reynolds Lake Oconee resident, Bob Newell, a few chance encounters within his neighborhood got him tracking the six degrees after separation that has shaped up to an amazing sequence of missed connections. When he ran into an old college buddy from Indiana, it was a coincidence. And when his friend across the street reunited with an old sorority sister from the early 60s, it was uncanny. And, when another neighbor came across his senior officer from his days stationed at Guantanamo Bay, it was just plain bizarre.
As it turns out, these stories aren’t that unusual around Lake Oconee. “Every time you get together with a half a dozen people or more, it seems you come across one of those weird stories where people were connected in a former life,” says Newell.
He has become the “Mayor of Lost Connections” at Reynolds Lake Oconee, of sorts, making note of these tales of people reconnecting after years apart instead of chalking it up to random coincidence. He has even encouraged local reunion events with college associations and fraternal groups throughout the years to seek out more connections.
Odds are strong that you will find new friends when moving to a new community. But it’s the old friends rediscovered by Newell and his neighbors in their retirement that turned out to be some of the biggest surprises of their lives. The stories continue to pile up and they often begin just as his own story did – by crossing paths with an old friend from Indiana.
It was the summer of 1960 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Bob Newell was staring at a few empty squares on his calendar. For the past few months he’d divided his time between studying the pages of text books and running laps at the track at The University of Tulsa. With a whole summer in front of him, Newell needed to occupy his time with earning some income. He turned to his friends at the athletic department for some help in finding a job, which led him to an exploratory oil rig in Richmond, Indiana.
“My thought was, the football coach didn’t want to get his players hurt, so this particular job is just right for a track guy,” says Newell.
The young college kid pulled together what little belongings he had and made the trek up to Indiana to join his crew. It definitely wasn’t your storybook summer job. The rig worked 24/7 and young Newell picked up a solid percentage of those hours each day.
After a few weeks passed that summer, the rig got moved south to a place known as the “stone city,” Bedford, Indiana. Here, Newell took a small apartment and lived off the light supplies that got him by from his previous days at Richmond – a few changes of clothes and a “scout cook kit,” as he calls it.
During a few hours of free time prior to a night shift, Newell took a trip to Spring Mill State Park, a small park with reservoir that many Hoosiers enjoy as a recreational destination when the weather’s right. As he lay on the beach soaking in some Vitamin D and fighting off the thoughts of a looming shift on the rig, he glanced up at a young man on the nearby lifeguard stand peering down at a book – Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, an epic tale of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family. Newell was familiar with the book. He’d been reading it this summer as well. That’s when he decided to approach the lifeguard to strike up a conversation.
“His name was Larry Combs,” says Newell. “He was a basketball player, going to school in engineering at Christian Brothers College. I was also an engineering student back at Tulsa and an athlete of sorts.” Comb’s family had just moved to the area and he was just getting to know the place himself.
The remaining days of summer consisted of some fun times for Newell and Combs; rides in Comb’s convertible with the top down, most likely listening to Chubby Checker, Sam Cooke, or the Drifters while driving around the square in Bedford, waving to folks. “We called it ‘getting votes,’” says Newell with a laugh. There were jaunts up to a dancehall in Jasper and to the Jazz Festival in Evansville. The two did a lot of running around and got into as much trouble as college kids could find in southern Indiana in the 1960s.
After the summer ended, Newell and Combs returned to their respective schools. They kept in touch by mail for a short while. These were the days before cell phones, and Facebook was an actual book issued to college freshmen. Thus, eventually, the correspondence fell off.
A few years later, the Newell family moved from Springfield to Rockford, Illinois. His parents joined the newcomers group in Rockford, most of whom were a generation younger than them. One of those youngsters happened to grab the elder Newell and ask if he knew a Bob from Tulsa. “Bob’s my son,” he told him.
“So here this guy shows up again in my life,” says Newell. “I think we might have gotten together once or twice when I visited Rockford.”
He actually ran into Combs again in Houston, Texas, in the early ‘70s. It was work related, but strange considering the size of the city.
Time went by, Newell moved to Mobile, Alabama, married his wife, Roxanne, moved to Los Angeles, California, had a daughter, moved to Saudi Arabia, had a son, returned to Wood River, Illinois, and subsequently moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
In 2004, he retired from Shell after 39 years and moved to Reynolds Lake Oconee to be closer to his two kids – both University of Georgia graduates. The Newells settled in nicely, making new friends and becoming involved in the community. In 2009, Roxanne donated a homemade cheesecake to a friend who was organizing a silent auction fundraiser for Saint Vincent DePaul. The successful bidder was a Mary Ann Combs. In making the arrangements to deliver the cake, Roxanne learned that Mary Ann’s husband was a guy named Larry.
“No way,” thought Newell. “It can’t be.”
As it turned out, it was.
In 49 years the two had run into each other on four separate occasions. It started with a paperback book in 1960 and after a wife, two kids, and more than six moves later, a cheesecake brought them back together again.
Newell soon found that own unusual reunion story only seemed to scratch the surface for a host of other chance encounters that he and Roxanne have uncovered since making their home in the Lake Oconee community.
Their Baton Rouge, Louisiana friends J.J. and Porge Casey made their move to Reynolds Lake Oconee three years ago after months of encouragement from the Newells. Bob knew Porge from his days working at Shell. He did volunteer work with the non-profit that Porge worked for at the time. Now, the two are living on the same street at Reynolds Lake Oconee.
With children in Charlotte, the Caseys were doing a lot of traveling and the Newells would invite them to stop by on their way back and forth. After only a couple of trips, the Caseys were sold. They sold their Baton Rouge home and picked up and moved to the lake.
Given her background in non-profits, Porge found herself looking for opportunities to give back to the local community. She found her calling through a volunteer position at the Oconee Regional Humane Society.
One of Porge’s first jobs was working with the ORHS newsletter. As she scrolled through the donor list to prepare her first newsletter for launch, a couple’s name jumped right out in her mind – Lucy and Jack Altherr. “It’s certainly not a last name you’d forget if you ever heard it before,” and Porge certainly had. Forty years ago, her husband, J.J., was assigned to Guantanamo Bay. He was a junior officer at the time and was assigned to shadow a seasoned senior officer – a man by the name of Jack Altherr.
Immediately, Porge spoke to a friend within the Humane Society about her former acquaintances. It turns out the friend knew Lucy who was living with her husband just a few short miles down Highway 44 in the neighboring community of Harbor Club.
“I thought to myself, ‘How bizarre is this?’” says Porge.
During their stint in Cuba, the Altherrs were much like sponsors for the Caseys as they made their transition to “Gitmo Bay.” Jack laughs that he and his much taller friend, J.J., must have looked like Mutt and Jeff as he followed him all over the base. For the several months of their tour there, the couples got together to play tennis and dined on occasion. After leaving, the couples kept in touch for a year or two but then lost contact after a while.
Now, four decades later, they find themselves back at the dinner table living a few miles apart, remembering their times spent in a location more than 1,000 miles away from Lake Oconee. “In a whole other life, we were together,” says Porge. “It is just amazing that we would meet up again all these years later.”
Aside from their former Baton Rouge buddies, the Newells didn’t have to look far from their front doorstep to find another tale of chance encounters. Across the street are neighbors Dr. Norm and Maryanne Hertzer. Both are full time residents of Cleveland, Ohio where Dr. Hertzer was chairman of the Department of Vascular Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic before retiring in 2005. Though their interests keep the two in their Cleveland townhome quite a bit, they love spending as much time as possible at Reynolds Lake Oconee.
Dr. Hertzer discovered the community while looking for retirement destinations in the southeast. “At that time, there were four golf courses,” says Dr. Hertzer, but it was enough to bring him south. Aside from the golf, the building costs and cost of living at Reynolds were attractive compared to similar resort communities, he says. So, he and his wife made plans to build a second home here.
Not long after its completion, the Newells invited the Hertzers to a Reynolds member function down the road at Great Waters. “It was a 1960s Rock and Roll Revival,” says Dr. Hertzer. “We got to the event and found ourselves at a table where Maryanne saw a face that looked awfully familiar.”
The face was that of Patricia Osborne (now Patterson), a sorority sister of Maryanne’s. The two had lived together in the same Pi Beta Phi sorority house at Indiana University in the early 1960s. They were also both dating their future husbands, Norm and Pat. From there, the couples had not had contact for nearly 50 years.
The Hertzers were happy to reconnect with the Pattersons and reminisce on their college days spent almost exactly 600 miles from the table that brought them together at Great Waters. And with it being at a “Rock and Roll Revival,” Maryanne and Patricia most likely were hearing some of the same tunes enjoyed between the walls of the Pi Beta Phi house on East Third Street in Bloomington, Indiana during their college years.
This article was published in the Fall 2014 issue of Lake Oconee Living magazine.
