“Hey, soldier boy!” With those three, flirtatious words, a love story was born.
My namesake and grandmother, Mama Ruth, had met her Norman on a double date with her best friend one hot Georgia summer day in the mid-1950s – only, he wasn’t her date. A few weeks later, when nothing had developed further from their respective dates, Mama Ruth was sitting in a car with her girlfriends at the drive-through. Over giggles and the radio, she turned and saw a tall man in uniform walking by. “That’s Norman,” she told her friends. “Oh, he is so handsome, Ruth,” they remarked. So she rolled down the window and yelled out those three, unforgettable words with a sweet, melodic voice, one that still fills the room with sugar when she tells the story today. He smiled, walked over to the car, leaned over to her window and said, “Well hey there, Miss Ruth.”
