Cupid strikes young-at-heart Friendship Village residents
Legend has Ponce de León unsuccessfully seeking the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine, Fla. He never met Nancy Bucey and Gil Miller, who may have found it.
“No, I’m not kidding you. I’m 92,” she’ll insist. “I just had a big birthday party here, and Mr. Miller bought all the flowers for all the tables to surprise me.”
Mr. Miller is Gil, who’s 91 and also could pass for someone much younger when he introduces himself to visitors at Friendship Village of South Hills in Upper St. Clair, where he and Nancy live.
And love.
“I never, ever thought I would be looking for a romance, at all,” Nancy said. “I had begun to get used to being single.”
She was married for almost 60 years to the late Wiley Bucey. And Gil celebrated his 64th anniversary with the former Marcie Daelhousen before she passed away in 2015, after they had settled in at Friendship Village.
“Every Wednesday and Saturday, a group meets and brings their own bottles, and we have cocktails together,” Gil said. “My wife and I went there originally.”
Nancy had seen them at such events, and eventually she and Gil became better acquainted.
“We sat down together and just had so many things in common, and he was so nice,” she recalled. “And handsome.”
To which he countered:
“Well, you were the best-looking girl at the table.”
Both graduated from local high schools during World War II: Nancy from Mt. Lebanon in 1944 and Gil from Brentwood the following year. He promptly enlisted in the Army Air Forces, as Japan’s surrender still was a couple of months away.
“I spent most of my time in Keesler Airfield in Mississippi, and I ended up as a surgical technician,” he said.
Meanwhile, Nancy’s future husband was serving in the Marines, and several years later, during the Korean War, Mr. Bucey was called back to duty.
“We got notice when we got back from our honeymoon,” she said. “He went to the West Coast, and I went with him. We thought we were going to bid each other farewell, but he was assigned instead to a draft board. We went to Syracuse, and he served there.”
In 1948, Gil started working in a hardware store that had just opened a location at Ruthfred Shopping Center in Bethel Park.
There was actually, at that time, a barn across the road, if you can believe that,” he recalled.
He later took ownership of the business, which still bears his name: Miller’s Ace Hardware.
In his retirement, he and Nancy enjoy many activities together within and outside of Friendship Village. They like to take bus trips offered by the community, venturing as far as Niagara Falls, and they’ve traveled to Florida.
And members of their respective families get along well with one another.
“Her daughter calls me her second father,” Gil said.
Word of the young-at-heart Friendship Village couple’s romance has made its way throughout the network of affiliated residents, as Nancy happened to mention it to Sloan Bentley, president and chief executive officer of parent company Lifespace Communities.
“Somehow we were talking, and I said, ‘You know, love had no age. I’ve fallen in love with one of my friends here at the home,” Nancy said. “And we’re an item.'”