LITTLE ROCK — Renee Baratka’s decision to exchange her books for a guitar, a polka band and some ski boots on Friday the 13th has turned into years of good luck.
Renee, a student nurse in Sheboygan, Wis., in February 1976, was urged by a friend to go on the ski trip with their ski club, but she almost said no because she needed to study.
“She said, ‘Forget it for now,’” Renee remembers. “She said, ‘There’s only three girls and 11 guys going so we’re going to have a great time!’”
Of course, Renee couldn’t say no to that.
Robert Steinpreis gave her friend a ride to meet the bus that would take them to the ski lodge and stopped to pick up Renee, who climbed in the back seat with her friend.
“We were on our way to the bus and she said to me, ‘Aren’t you bringing your guitar?’ I said, no, I wasn’t going to bring it this time,” she says.
Robert had been in a polka band and was thrilled to hear that she played.
“He said, ‘You’re bringing your guitar,’ and he turned around and we went back and got my guitar and we had our sing-along for our six- or eighthour trip up to Indianhead,” she says.
They skied the next day — Valentine’s Day — and that night there was a polka band at the lodge.
“They played polkas and we danced the polka in ski boots, after skiing all day,” she says.
“We probably couldn’t do it now,” Robert quips.
Renee liked Robert, but she wasn’t sure she would see him again when the trip was over.
“We had a great time, and it was one of those weekends where you just think, ‘Well, this is just another fun weekend and I’ll never see him again.’ He had a different girlfriend,” she says. “But on Monday, he left his other girlfriend.”
Robert wowed Renee by stopping by for a visit while clad in his firefighter uniform, and they learned they shared many of the same interests — skiing, canoeing and biking, to name a few.
“He knew I loved canoeing because I had my own canoe paddle. He knew I liked biking because I had my own bike and I also had my own slalom ski,” Renee says. “So he knew I wasn’t just a fake athlete — I was the real deal.”
Renee’s friend was skeptical of their relationship and warned her that Robert would break her heart. Renee brushed off her advice to stay away from him.
“I said, ‘Well, so be it. I don’t think so.’ And he never did,” she says.
Just two weeks after they met, Robert proposed, and she accepted.
“We knew. I didn’t have to think. I had no question,” she says.
She was in school, though, and they also wanted to wait a respectable amount of time before they exchanged their vows.
They were married on Oct. 29, 1976, by a judge in Sheboygan, six months after they met, and they had a more formal wedding in the Catholic church the following March.
“It happened to be Friday the 13th of February when we met. Saturday was Valentine’s Day. We fell in love,” Renee says. “And then we got married around Halloween. He figured it would all work out this way, with all these significant dates, some bad-luck ones.”
Robert and Renee moved from Wisconsin to Hot Springs Village after they retired from firefighting and nursing, respectively.
They still like to dance the polka, and did so recently at a fundraiser for the Animal Welfare League.
“We’ve danced all through our married life,” she says.
Renee also teaches digital photography and photo editing to retirees in Hot Springs Village, and she has taken many aerial photos of her town as well. They love to travel and have seen much of the world together.
Not long after they married, Renee got a job in a hospital emergency room.
“He would go to accidents and bring people in and I would be in the emergency room getting the people he would bring in with the police,” Renee says. “When he brought someone in he would give me all the information I needed.”
She thinks they would have met eventually, even if she hadn’t gone on that ski trip.
“Oh, sure, our paths would have crossed somewhere down the line. I wouldn’t doubt that at all. But who knows who else we would have met in the meantime?” she says. “The timing on this and many other things that have happened in our lives was important — we were in the right place at the right time, for the right thing to occur.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
He says: “Follow your heart.”
She says: “I think that’s very good, but I also say keep the lines of communication open and find something good in everything. No matter the worst situation or the worst thing that happened, good always comes out if you look for it.”
The first time I saw my future spouse I thought:
She says: “I thought he was pretty cute.”
He says: “I couldn’t see her very well because she was in the back seat.”
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High Profile, Pages 43 on 11/18/2012