A Valentine’s Day special proposal (in June of 1993)

What I am about to tell you is the God’s honest truth. And what I had to go through to put this together was nothing short of Herculean.

I had actually dated Vicki for about six months, and she was cool with being involved with a single father who had two young daughters and a cat.  Well, maybe not the cat.  Be that as it may, though, as the months progressed, I felt that this girl could be the one that would make me happy for the rest of my life.

And if I was going to set up a wedding proposal, it had to be top notch.

In my case, it involved the staff of the Albany-Colonie Yankees.

It’s June 18, 1993, and the A-C Yanks are playing the New Britain Red Sox.  The A-C Yankees’ big gun, Brien Taylor, was on the mound and he was mowing the Britsox down like they were stray weeds.  Hard to believe that at one time the New York Yankees organization was counting on Brien Taylor to be their next superstar pitcher.  How times have changed.

Anyways, Vicki and I, along with my daughters Sonya and Cassaundra, went to the game.  We had decent seats along the first base line (Heritage Park’s first base line were high metal bleachers; the third-base line seemed to extend out to Latham).  The game was going well, Brien Taylor showed a tremendous amount of fire on the mound, and my kids were having fun at the ballpark.  Vicki was also having fun – she found my article about 1940’s Albany Senators pitcher Orie Arntzen in the A-C Yankees’ yearbook, and was telling everybody she could that her boyfriend (me) wrote that full-length history piece.

Around the third inning, I told Vicki and the kids I had to go to the restroom, so I left them to watch the game and headed toward the lavatories.

Or at least that’s what I TOLD Vicki I was going to do.  Instead, when Vicki and the kids weren’t looking, I darted into the clubhouse.  In a carefully-concocted plan between myself and the front office of the A-C Yankees, I was going to switch places with the guy in the team mascot costume.  The A-C Yanks had two mascots – an anthromorphic baseball costume, and a gorilla costume (“Ball-Rilla,” I think it was called).  The gorilla costume was a better fit for me, so I switched places with the guy in the gorilla suit.

News flash.  If you wear glasses in a mascot costume, be prepared to have them fog over in about 5 seconds flat, especially when it’s 95 degrees outside.

Disguised in my monkey suit, I was led back out to the diamond by one of the A-C Yankees’ interns.  I was guided to stand atop the roof of the home dugout, and although I could not move more than a few feet at a time in the heavy ape suit, I was able to get the crowd to cheer and start up a small wave.

Middle of the fourth inning.  I had already told the A-C Yankees about Vicki’s seat location, so they made up a dummy contest for the winner sitting in section X, row Y, seat Z – which corresponded to Vicki’s seat.  Of course, she’s excited because she won a contest, and here comes a big hairy gorilla mascot to bring her her gift.

A gift that my sainted grandmother had given me, a special piece of jewelry that had been in the Miller family for four generations.

Vicki watched as the gorilla mascot took off one of the costume gloves.  And there it was, in a replacement box – my great-grandmother’s engagement ring.

Now off comes the mask.  And sucking in about 10 gallons of fresh air, the first dose of clean oxygen I had inhaled in about an inning and a half, I asked Vicki to marry me.

A year later, we walked down the aisle together, and we’ve been together ever since.

Forget chocolates and flowers and the like – if you really want to impress a future bride, you need a gorilla suit, a minor league baseball team, and a whole lot of moxie.