John & Kathy Allen
In Rodgers and Hammerstein's imagination, you will see your true love on some enchanted evening. "You may hear her laughing across a crowded room," the creators of South Pacific tell us, "and the sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams."
For John Allen, the sight of Kathy Best "dressing chickens and riding a tractor" was enough to convince him that he'd met his soul mate. After inheriting a seventh-generation family farm near Saxonburg that dates back to 1816, he made what he considered a radical decision for a Shady Side Academy graduate from Squirrel Hill: He chose to become a farmer. "I had spent summers and weekends on the farm, and it was all I ever wanted to do in life," insists the 64-year-old Allen. He just needed the right woman to share in the responsibilities and bucolic pleasures of running a 250-acre spread, complete with 400 purebred beef cows.
A fellow Shady Side classmate introduced John and Kathy Allen, and right away they meshed on account of their similar backgrounds and dreams. The now 62-year-old Kathy Allen had divided her youth between her parents' home in Pittsburgh and her grandparents' farm in the country - not far away from his, as it turned out, near Marwood, Butler County. "Today, few if any children have that experience," she says, wistfully. After they both finished their master's degrees at University of Pittsburgh, they married in 1970, learned to maintain a purebred cattle herd and took over his family farm. Thus began a working partnership that has lasted 37 years and has yielded two sons and countless baby cows.
While their life is in many ways a dream straight out of a William Wordsworth poem, "It's really hard to have sanity in your marriage at times and work together," Kathy Allen confides. What's the secret of their success? "You need real clear communication or you're in trouble." To that end, they have regular family meetings that include their two children, John, 33, and Andy, 30, who jointly operate a garden-supply business on the property. Their family discussions are not exactly Brady Bunch-style powwows. These gatherings are much more like corporate board meetings, where "only impending death excuses you from attendance," according to Kathy Allen, "and all cell phones must be turned off."
As important as communication is to couples in business together, another imperative, they say, is the division of labor. "You can't separate the work from the rest of your life" when you work around the clock with your spouse, and as a consequence, Kathy advises, "You have to be honest about what you need in each other." In the old days, when their operation was based solely on raising cattle, the couple would take turns checking on birthing calves in the middle of the night, each one taking a two-hour shift. They still have plenty of cows at Armstrong Farms, named for one of John Allen's ancestors, but in 1996, they opened up a bed-and-breakfast and in 2000 started hosting weddings here - a shift toward what they call "agri-tourism" - so divvying up the work is still as vital as ever. What works best, they've found, is to put him in charge of dealing with commercial vendors and her in charge of working with clients - especially the nervous, excited brides.
At first, they weren't sure how their new venture would succeed, especially given their lack of experience in tourism. All that angst tested their personal relationship, but now they say they feel an even stronger bond for having formed a new vision for their business and having struggled to achieve it - together. Their next goal? To be good enough stewards of the land to pass it on to the next generation, says John Allen. After that?
His wife doesn't hesitate with the answer - a vacation - just the two of them.
Yuan Chang & Patrick Moore
Some marriages are held together by the common goal of building a house or raising a child, muses physician Patrick Moore. He and his wife, Yuan Chang, also a medical doctor, had something else - a deadly virus. This husband-and-wife team of scientists, lured away from the New York medical world in 2002 by the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is famous for using innovative molecular-biology techniques to unearth new viruses and pathogens. They were awarded the Charles S. Mott Prize in 2003, among the most prestigious science prizes in the world, for their discovery of Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV), the cause of a common malignancy occurring in AIDS patients.
For the Squirrel Hill pair, love in the time of cholera isn't just a romance by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - it's the story of their life together. Sitting comfortably, Indian-style, on a couch in her Squirrel Hill home, Yuan Chang, 48, explains how she and Patrick Moore, 51, became a couple and a professional duo. The answer? Pretty much all by accident, she says.
They met in medical school at the University of Utah in 1981. At her freshman orientation, Moore, by then a seasoned teacher's assistant, addressed her class as a representative of the group Physicians for Social Responsibility. "He looked like a real hippie in his denim jacket," she recalls. But his attire was just the tip. When Moore took to the podium, instead of introducing himself, Moore yelled, "Thermonuclear war!" His point, he says, looking back, was to convince the students that what they were studying, however important, was trivial when compared with the threat posed by nuclear war.
"What a weirdo," Chang recalls telling a girlfriend. "Hey, it got your attention," offers Moore, his hands folded confidently behind his head. After a first date at a Japanese restaurant, followed by dancing, they began a relationship that would take them all over the country - from Colorado to Atlanta to New York - as they embarked on separate scientific careers. Chang's focus was initially on the brain, while Moore studied infectious diseases.
Chang was working as an assistant professor at Columbia University and Moore was leading the Big Apple's department of health when they stumbled into the act of working together. Both had seen intriguing, published data suggesting a link between cancer and a mystery virus. But how to find this virus? He possessed the knowledge of disease; she possessed the skills in molecular biology and something else important - a laboratory. He quit his job and went to work as her unpaid lab technician. Using revolutionary techniques involving DNA analysis, they discovered KSVH, uncovered its link to cancer and opened their door to other potential breakthroughs in the study of disease.
What's more, they found that they loved working together. "Her skill set is different than mine. She excels in the lab and is good at managing people. I tend to write more, lecture more," he explains. "It's a fantastic way to work. There's no way in hell I could do this without Yuan." She chimes in: "I feel the same way."
Having "different but complementary personalities" is the key to their success, Moore insists. "If you're similar, there's no synergy together." He doesn't prescribe working together as a tonic for every marriage, though. "It's not for everyone, not by any stretch of the imagination. You have to be compatible, and both people have to be equally interested in the collaboration." Indeed, Chang remembers how difficult it was for the pair to adjust initially to spending 24 hours together. "That's a lot of time to spend with another person." They occasionally had to take "forced breaks" from each other to keep their union strong.
Advises Moore: If you're not as lucky as they've been and it doesn't work, "You need a way to pull apart without pulling apart."
Geoffrey W. Melada is a lawyer, writer and hopeful romantic living in Shadyside.