When Stephen Vasconcellos lost his wife of 45 years to heart failure, he had a premonition about his first love. Wartime sweethearts
begin againA SECOND BEGINNING
Lisa Asato / lasato@starbulletin.com
"When the casket was going out the door, I was still in the church, and I asked God to help me find Margie," says Vasconcellos, now 75.
Margie was his sweetheart during the war when he was an 18-year-old merchant marine from Paia, and she was a 15-year-old from Kauai. It was their first romance; they didn't kiss until months after they met in 1944.
The couple would meet every Tuesday when his ship, the Hualalai, pulled into Nawiliwili Harbor, where she sold lei to island-hopping passengers or to troops bound for Christmas Island.
"He always used to tell me, 'I'll see you next trip,'" recalls Marge Powell, now 72. "That's how it went for several years until he went into the service and ... our lives got separated."
Vasconcellos had left Hawaii without an explanation, writing to her later from the Aleutian Islands.
"It was just being young and doing things at the spur of the moment," he says, adding he volunteered for the Army after seeing a recruitment poster promising travel beyond Hawaii's shores.
"After that, he had his life and I had mine," Powell says.
She went on to marry three times and raise six children. With her second husband, she moved to the Philippines to build a shoe factory and to Australia, where they started and ran two import-export stores.
Vasconcellos married a bank teller in 1949, and he worked as a territorial guard at Oahu Prison for 25 years before working for two more decades for the state and private sector.
But they never forgot each other.
"All through my life I always thought about him," Powell says. "I always thought, well, 'I hope he's raising his children,' and things like that."
After a lifetime apart, fate intervened one Sunday in 1994 -- half a century after they first met.
"I insisted on going to Longs that Sunday afternoon," Vasconcellos recalls. "The beer wasn't on sale, so my friend and I didn't buy anything. We were walking out the door when a lady passed."
Vasconcellos can't explain the feeling that led him to say to his friend, "Eh, I know that lady."
He asked her, "Are you Margie from Kauai?"
"Yes," came the reply. "Who are you?"
"I'm Stephen."
"My mouth dropped. I couldn't focus right," Powell recalls. "'My Stephen,' I said to myself. I took his face in my hands, and I couldn't believe that was still him."
"She hugged me and kissed me, and we got talking," Vasconcellos says. What they discovered in the next minutes blew them away. Both had lost their spouses that same year within two months of each other. And both Vasconcellos and Powell had been living at Kukui Plaza for years, she in the Diamond Head tower for 11 years and he in the Ewa tower for eight.
"And we had never seen each other," Vasconcellos says. "To this day we can't get over that."
The couple, who refer to each other as "fiance" but have no plans to marry, still have vivid memories from their "young love" on Kauai -- walks along the breakwater, movies at Lihue Theater, drives to Hanalei in a borrowed 1939 Ford nicknamed the "Cannon Ball."
"Our young love that we left on Kauai, we felt that it was worth the wait," Powell says. "He and I talked about that.
"We waited 50 years before we found each other. Not very many people can say that and be happy with all of the things we've been through. I don't think anymore of how my life used to be. We take care of each other, we love each other, there isn't anything I wouldn't do for him or he wouldn't do for me.
"But to think that we left Kauai such a long time ago. I still can't believe how he recognized me.
"It was just -- how would you put it? -- incredible."