It doesn’t feel like it was 25 years ago today, Oct. 7, 2000, that Crystal Abbe said the words “I do,” either before or after me, I don’t remember the order.
Two fun parts to this story:
We met as young staffers at The News Virginian, then a daily newspaper here in Waynesboro.
Only, Crystal almost wasn’t a staffer.
She’d interviewed for an open job at the paper, but our editor at the time was an unfortunately very distracted man.
Later, he would be perp-walked out of the building after it was discovered that he was looking at porn on his work computer all hours of the workday.
We just thought he was bad at his job.
I mean, he was, but also, the porn.
The distractions could be why he’d interviewed Crystal for an open job, and just hadn’t called her back yet.
Newsroom practice was, if the phone rang, you jumped to grab it before it went over to voicemail, because you couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t somebody calling with a Woodward and Bernstein-level tip that would change the world.
Around noon one day, the phone rang, I answered, and it was a distressed-sounding young woman calling to say that she had interviewed for a job, and really wanted to know what the status of that was.
I got her name and promised that someone would call her back.
I rifled through the resumes on the editor’s desk, and found the one – and noted to our photographer, Amanda, that, hey, this person was a local, a graduate of Fort Defiance High School, so, if she got the job, maybe she wouldn’t leave in six months like everybody else new that we’d hired.
Yeah, it was Crystal who had called, and me who made sure she got the job.
Serendipity, there.
Second fun story: her first week on the job, I was in the newsroom when the publisher came in to introduce himself to her, and he told her that he’d heard good things about her, and had high expectations.
Her response, as I remember it: you should expect no less.
I was sold.
At this point in my life, I was too focused on myself, to the point that, I wasn’t looking to date anybody, because I didn’t want anything to get in the way of what I wanted to do, which was, I dunno, the plan was to take over the world, generally speaking.
Which was why it was odd that I found myself bringing her strawberries and chocolates and writing her 99-line poems, because, I didn’t do that kind of thing.
The story of how we got engaged is another fun one.
I wrote a weekly humor column that ran on Fridays in the paper’s Entertainment section, which she was normally responsible for laying out.
I don’t remember how I was able to finagle the workaround, but on this particular Friday, somebody else was in charge of Entertainment.
The layout guy in charge of the page that night was the only one in on the secret, until, I would learn later, he shared with others on the desk that night.
The secret: I used my weekly column to propose.
Crystal and I were sharing an apartment by this point, so I had to arrange for her to read the paper first thing the next morning – crucially, before anybody would call and spoil the surprise.
We were up early, around 7 a.m., and I handed her the paper to read.
It took her forever to get to the Entertainment page, which was the C section of the paper.
I swear to God, she read every story in the paper, start to finish.
My heart raced when she finally got to my column.
The layout had the column starting on the front page, then jumping to an inside page for the finish.
This particular column was, on the surface, about Y2K, and the pending end of the world that some seemed to think was coming with the computers going haywire.
When she finally got to the end, which was me proposing, she looked at me, and at first didn’t say anything.
“I want to hear you say the words,” she finally got out.
The phone started ringing within a couple of minutes. Apparently, everybody else had read it before she did, and had somehow held themselves off from calling, just in case.
For a while afterward, people who read my columns would ask, was that really how you proposed, and I would say, yep.
And then the followup: what if she had said no?
“I’d be working for a weekly in Nome, Alaska,” was the reply.
It’s hard to believe, that was 1999.
The 25 years since the dueling I do’s is both a long time and a blur, especially when you consider yourself, as I do, to still be in your early thirties.
We launched Augusta Free Press in 2002, two years into our marriage, and got our hands into several fun projects – I ran for a seat on Waynesboro City Council in 2008; served as the chair of the Waynesboro Democratic Committee for three years; volunteered the both of us to help run the Waynesboro Generals for six years; dragged Crystal into the pro wrestling business for another five-year run.
Crystal, for her part, on our trip back from our honeymoon, told me that she wanted, one day, to do something to honor the memory of her identical twin, Christina, who died by suicide when they were 15; she joined the board of a group called the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and went on to become the executive director of the Virginia chapter of AFSP.
When she came back to working with AFP full time was when we started to take off.
I tend to get the credit for AFP because I’ve been the byline that folks have seen for the past 23 years, but it was Crystal’s attention to the bottom-line detail that kept us afloat long enough for us to make it sustainable.
Which is why it was so personally pleasing for me that, in 2022, we had grown to the point that Crystal was able, for the first time, to join the staff as a full-time writer.
Her voice has made AFP much more complete editorially – with her advocacy for mental health and suicide prevention, for women’s equality and reproductive freedoms, for affordable housing and a focus on the unhoused.
I can’t tell you how lucky I am that I was the one to answer the phone the day that she called The News Virginian to find out if she was going to be offered a job.
That I overheard her tell the publisher that she planned to surpass his expectations.
That she didn’t go away for the weekend that she’d had planned with her college friends when I asked her out in front of the whole newsroom.
(She initially turned me down, you know.)
That her answer, after she made me say the words out loud, was, “Of course.”
She’s still as pretty as the day is long, and always will be.
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Chris Graham
