Jim Daly ticked off the names of Romance languages in the fall of 1962, and Eleanor Birau let him know that he left out Romanian.
Eleanor, whose parents had immigrated from Romania, had just been hired as a microbiologist in the lab at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit after leaving a position at Detroit Memorial Hospital. She would serve as a project assistant to Jim.
The first time I saw my spouse:
He says: “She was very pretty with dark hair and dark eyes, and I was kind of attracted to girls with dark hair and dark eyes because everyone in my family has blonde hair and blue eyes.”
She says: “I thought, ‘He sure is tall.’ He was 6 foot 4 at the time.”
My advice for a happy marriage is:
He says: “Get two television sets.”
She says: “If there’s a problem, weigh it and decide which is the better way to go. More often than not, you have to decide if it’s worth destroying a marriage or making a big deal about. There are a lot of things you need to just look past.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “I remember carrying my wife across the threshold.”
She says: “The first one was a flash. The only people who knew were our best man and our best matron and our parents.”
"That was funny because she was making more money than I was," he says.
This was their first conversation, however, so they didn't know any of that yet.
"It was break time, I think. He came in the door wanting to know what time it was and what day it was because he was supposed to be at school," she says. "He was working on his master's and he lost track of time somehow, which happens. So I saw him there in the door, this confused, tall, good-looking guy."
When he realized he was late anyway on that particular day, he stuck around to chat with his colleagues and Eleanor. A group of workers from the lab usually took coffee breaks together and, through conversations during that downtime, she and Jim got to know each other better.
He was fascinated by her Romanian background.
Both, they discovered, were first-generation Americans. Her parents had immigrated from Romania, his from Great Britain.
She started going with him on field trips after work and on weekends, dipping screens into streams in the woods in hopes of collecting insect larvae for his parasite research.
"I am not interested in that kind of thing at all but that's what he liked to do and I would go along with it," she says.
One of their favorite things to do together back then was to go to drive-in movies in her Ford convertible.
"We would get some French bread or Russian bread," he says. "European bread with butter and lunch meat and a few fixings -- that was good stuff. It was nice."
Jim was accepted by the Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans and went there to begin work on his doctorate in parasitology and tropical medicine.
In 1964, after he had been there a few months and returned for a visit, they decided they much preferred being in the same city.
"He never proposed to me," Eleanor says. "I proposed to him. We were talking about getting married, about being together and I said, 'Well, why don't we get married?' And he said, 'Why don't you ask me?' and I said, 'OK, will you marry me?'"
Because of his post-graduate academic work, they had only a narrow window in which to schedule their wedding, and they couldn't get the hall they wanted until September 1965. His ever-changing schedule made any plans tenuous.
"He said, 'Let's just get married and then if something happens and I can't make it ...'" she says.
So on June 16, 1965, they exchanged their vows in front of a justice of the peace. Shortly after that, Jim returned to New Orleans and Eleanor stayed behind to plan their church wedding and to finish up her job at Henry Ford. They were married again on Sept. 6, 1965.
"Our wedding was in a Syrian Orthodox church, and our reception was in an Italian-American hall," Jim says. "We had a Romanian band and all my groomsmen were part- or full-Polish and all her grooms-ladies, except for one, were Serbian. And a gang of Gypsies showed up who were friends of my mother-in-law. And then we took off for New Orleans and we were just in time for a hurricane [Betsy]."
They were separated by miles again when Jim went to Latin America for a three-month-long Public Health Service fellowship in tropical diseases.
"But we've never wanted to be apart," he says. "I really missed her."
The Dalys have three children -- Kathleen Fuller of Geneva, Ohio; Jim Daly Jr. of Allen, Texas; and Pat Francis of Little Rock. They also have nine grandchildren.
In 1968, Jim took a job in the department of microbiology, immunology, parasitology at the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock, now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He retired in 2000. Eleanor worked during that time as a medical technologist at Arkansas Children's Hospital and at St. Vincent Infirmary.
He picked up some Romanian over the years, but his primary romance language has been love.
"I knew Russian, and I knew German and I knew Spanish and I studied Latin. I only learned a few phrases in Romanian, but it wasn't necessary," he says. "Eleanor and I consider ourselves very lucky to have found each other. We're a perfect match. I'm kind of eccentric, but Eleanor puts up with me and we pretty much see eye to eye and it's really been great. Fifty years of wonderful."
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High Profile on 04/19/2015