CALABASAS : War Romance Has Endured for 50 Years

Love in war was more than fair to Allan and Rene Gottlieb. The fireworks of their courtship were buzz bombs, brilliant flashes in the night skies of England during World War II.

He was a 26-year-old dentist in the U. S. Army who had just arrived for duty in England. She was in the British Army, drafted at 21 as a wireless radio operator stationed in Preston. Fifty years later, the war just a chapter in the history of their lives, the Gottliebs, now of Calabasas, are celebrating a love that has lasted a lifetime.

They met on a dance floor in Preston on a gloomy February night in 1944. Allan spotted Rene dancing with his friend and asked to switch partners. They fell in love as they fox-trotted and waltzed the night away. “Allan took a fancy to me and I took a fancy to him,” Rene said. “It was love ever since.”

But circumstances soon separated them.

Allan, a Brooklyn native, was transferred to treat soldiers in Belgium. But he says he could think of nothing but Rene.

“I fell head over heels,” he said. “I would chase all over England trying to get to her.”

Allan would hitch rides on bombers and military transport planes, making every excuse to return to England. Finally, he arranged to be transferred back and the two were married in an old temple in Richmond.

“There was plenty of adrenaline flowing in those days,” Rene said. “It was a very exciting time.”

The rabbi who married them had to stop the ceremony whenever a bomber passed overhead, listening to make sure it faded into the distance before continuing.

Their real honeymoon came two years later. The war had ended and Allan was in New York awaiting Rene’s arrival after a six-month separation. She arrived on the Queen Mary, with thousands of other brides making the voyage to rejoin the husbands they had met during the war.

Allan remembers scanning the crowded waiting room for a glimpse of her.

“Finally I spotted her,” he said. “It was the thrill of my life.” A reporter from the New York Post picked the couple out of the crowd at random and recorded their whirlwind reunion--from the top of the RCA building to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

In 1987, after Allan retired from his dental practice in Long Island, they moved to California to be near their two children and three grandchildren.

On Sunday, about 40 friends and family members gathered at their son’s home in Topanga Canyon to commemorate the Gottliebs’ 50 years together.

“I gave a toast to life and a toast to romance,” said their son, David. “There just doesn’t seem to be that kind of romance anymore.”