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When Joan Lally was an 18-year-old freshman at what was then Wilkes College, back in the 1950s, she noticed a young man at the end of the row in math class.
				&ldquo;Why are you sitting there all by yourself? Why don&rsquo;t you come over and sit with us?&rdquo; she invited him, indicating he was welcome to join her and two other young women.
				&ldquo;I was pretty bold in those days,&rdquo; Joan, 83, of Forty Fort, told a reporter, as she reminisced about her 60 years of marriage to Tom Lally, the young man in her math class, who was a few years older and attending college on the GI Bill.
				Tom passed away in October 2019, and Joan thinks about him every day. As she recently reflected on many happy memories, she offered to share them in time for Valentine&rsquo;s Day.
				&ldquo;We had a fairy tale romance,&rdquo; she said, explaining with a smile that she was the one who got things started.
				&ldquo;He had a car and one day I said to him, &lsquo;Why don&rsquo;t you take me for a ride after class?&rsquo; He drove me around Harveys Lake, and then we went to the Top Hat Diner.&rdquo;
				Soon they were going steady, which meant she wore his cherished ring from Meyers High School. He teased her by saying that, because he had to pay for car expenses, she couldn&rsquo;t really expect an engagement ring.
				&ldquo;You&rsquo;re riding around in your diamond,&rdquo; he told her.
				But when it was time to graduate in the spring, he took her to church at his home parish, St. Boniface Church, and at one point reached for her hand.
				&ldquo;I was trying to pay attention to the Mass,&rdquo; Joan said, remembering she was dimly aware that he was pulling at the Meyers High School ring on her finger. &ldquo;His precious ring,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I thought he wanted to check it to make sure I was taking care of it.&rdquo;
				But, no, what he was doing was replacing the class ring with a diamond ring. The engagement for Joan Rishkofski and Tom Lally was official.
				By summer&rsquo;s end, he had a landed a job working for Aetna Insurance in Connecticut and she had called a school district in Hartford that hired her over the phone, as a high school teacher of mathematics.
				One little challenge: the school district wanted her to start work on the Tuesday after Labor Day &mdash; and that was only a few days after they told her she had a job.
				Tom and Joan put together their wedding in less than a week &mdash; applying for the marriage license, making arrangements at the church, finding a pretty gown, and arranging for her parents to come in from New Jersey.
				&ldquo;My mother-in-law arranged a breakfast and a wedding cake,&rdquo; Joan said, and within hours after the wedding, she and Tom were packing up a car for a drive to Connecticut, and their new adventure.
				&ldquo;We would get paid every other week,&rdquo; she said, remembering the early days of establishing a household. &ldquo;And we would buy things like pots and pans.&rdquo;
				Their adventure continued when they eventually decided to leave Connecticut and return to the Wyoming Valley, where Tom had grown up and Joan had lived before her family moved to New Jersey.
				In between Connecticut and Wyoming Valley, she said, &ldquo;we decided to go to Europe and stay until our money ran out. We traveled like vagabonds.&rdquo;
				After two months in Europe, where Joan was in the early stages of pregnancy, they came back to the United States and had a son they named Thomas after his dad.
				Tom wanted Joan to be a stay-at-home mom, so she did stay home during their son&rsquo;s early years, later easing herself back into the work force to use her math skills in the tax preparation field.
				She was busy with that, and Tom worked at RCA. Aside from work and parenting, their marriage was as romantic as ever.
				It wasn&rsquo;t just that they took memorable vacations together, to Europe, Tahiti and Australia. And it wasn&rsquo;t just that Tom was always bringing her fresh flowers.
				It was that they made a good team, working side by side, for example, to replace every window in their Forty Fort home. &ldquo;He was very talented,&rdquo; Joan said, noting that her husband also built closets and bookshelves, put in tile and, among his many projects, rewired the house.
				He knew she appreciated him, she said, especially when she took the time in recent years to write a poem. It says, in part, &ldquo;I need only look at you, hold your hand, and I find peace. You are my greatest blessing.&rdquo;

Forty Fort woman reflects on 60 years of ‘a fairy tale romance’