To Win His Valentine, the Sky Was the Limit
Getting his valentine out onto their beachfront deck Sunday proved to be more trouble for Roger von der Hellen than popping The Question.
He paid big bucks for a plane to fly by their Surfside home with a banner reading: “Cheryl, Will You Marry Me? Love Roger.” But it took some serious threats to pry his sweetheart, Cheryl Coleman, away from the Lakers-Celtics game on television.
“It was Boston ,” explained Coleman, a 32-year-old therapist for pregnant and parenting teen-agers. “I wouldn’t go outside. Finally, he said, ‘Quick! Quick! Come see this!’ ”
Von der Hellen’s highly public Valentine’s Day proposal met with success, but a smiling Coleman told her new fiance: “We’ll have to get married before the (basketball) season starts. Or after the playoffs.”
For Bob Cannon, owner of the plane that tugged von der Hellen’s proposal, romance makes pretty good money: $250 to $350, depending on how far the banner has to be flown.
“Weeeeell, I’ve already got three ‘Will You Marry Me’s,’ ” Cannon said Sunday at noon from his eight-plane Sky Ads business, located at Huntington Beach’s Meadowlark Airport. “I’ve got some guy calling from a pay phone somewhere. . . . They see one of the banners and get the idea. All of a sudden they say, ‘God, I should’ve got something better than flowers!’ ”
Still, velvety red roses were selling by the dozens at Orange County florists. Belgian chocolate at $28 per pound was selling well at one South Coast Plaza shop. And sets of wedding rings were the big item in demand Sunday at Nathan Alan Jewelers in the Costa Mesa mall, saleswoman Sandy Streeter said.
A handful of sly swains at Oshman’s Sporting Goods on Sunday actually bought the objects of their affections baseballs, mitts and Lakers T-shirts--size extra large, said store manager Ken Hutton, unable to subdue a grin.
Romance was refreshingly cheap and basic Sunday in Laguna Beach. In the sand of Main Beach, one man used a shovel to dig a message to his valentine. First, he shaped a 10-foot-wide heart in the sand. Then he dug trenches to form a maritime background of whales and lobsters. Inside the heart, he wrote: “I Luv (sic) you.”
But cost was no object for von der Hellen.
Starting about 2 p.m., the rented plane buzzed the beach at Surfside for nearly 30 minutes. On each sweep, “Take My Breath Away,” a song from the movie “Top Gun,” sputtered out of the plane’s speakers as a few couples necked on beach towels and others gazed out over the surf.
“It was so romantic,” Coleman said, her new diamond ring sparkling in the sun as she recalled the beginning of a romance born 10 years ago in humor.
The couple met at a party while waiting in a bathroom line that could rival a wait at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Together, they swiped all the toilet paper, then sold it to the guests.
On Sunday, amid neighbors and friends gathered for the surprise aerial message on the porch of their house in the gated community between Seal Beach and Huntington Harbour, they said they had dated for five years before breaking down and agreeing to set up a household together.
“For 10 years, we weren’t going to get involved,” said von der Hellen, 40, a technical trainer for Volvo. He squeezed his bride-to-be, who had changed into her “good sweats” after the proposal. “All that’s changed today. . . . Figured it was time to legitimize this.”