In May of 1961, Anne Hilleman, a student at State Center High School, experienced an unthinkable tragedy after her junior prom when the car she was riding in was hit by a drunk driver on Highway 330. The accident killed the driver of the vehicle (and her date), Steve Goecke, and injured three others including Anne, who was left in a coma for months and remained hospitalized for at least another month and a half after regaining consciousness. She had a broken jaw, teeth knocked out and serious head trauma, and she didn’t return to her family home near State Center until the end of August.

“She didn’t move her eyes until late in September — an exciting day, Mrs. Hilleman recalled — and didn’t move her hands until early November,” a story from Dec. 26, 1961 read. “‘That’s the way it’s been,’ her mother said. ‘About the time you get discouraged, she does something new.'”

It was a long road to recovery at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, and despite the grim circumstances, a silver lining emerged from the situation. Later that same year, the T-R sent a reporter out to write a story on Anne’s progress, and as her older brother John remembers it, the Associated Press picked up a picture of her in a hospital bed holding a teddy bear. It went nationwide, and a group of girls in their late teens and early 20s from upstate New York and Vermont who had also endured terrible tragedies — the Sunbeam Sisters — began to write Anne letters of support and struck up a pen pal friendship with her. One of them would change John’s life forever.

“We were flooded with mail. State Center is a small town. All you need is a name. You don’t need a street address,” he said. “My mother said ‘You’re not married. You write to these girls.’ So I did.”

PHOTO VIA T-R ARCHIVES A photo from the June 9, 1962 edition of the Times-Republican shows Anne Hilleman during her recovery process after suffering devastating injuries in a car accident in May of 1961.

John was 21 at the time and fresh out of the U.S. Navy. The first girl he took a “shining” to was named Melody Allen, who had been widowed at a young age when the trailer she and her husband were living in caught fire. Her husband pushed her out of a window and saved her life, but he couldn’t save himself. Another of the girls, whose name was Vivian (Benson) Colson, was married at 17 before her husband, Gary Colson, died of an epileptic seizure 14 months later, leaving her with a young baby to raise and forcing her to move back in with her parents.

In 1963, a man from Vermont came all the way to central Iowa to visit Anne, and he talked John into going back there with him to meet the girls he’d been corresponding with since the accident. Surprisingly for the young Mr. Hilleman, the girl he had his eyes on, Melody, was no longer interested in talking to him or seeing him, so he deduced that she must’ve had a boyfriend — his daughter Michele Vanderhoff compared it to the modern phenomenon of “catfishing.” Down but not out, he traveled across the New York state line and met Vivian, who was living with her parents and daughter in the small town of Corinth about 45 miles north of Albany.

“Her mother was there with her and her baby, and we spent a couple years there talking to him. At least I knew she existed, and she looked like the pictures she had sent me,” he said.

After that short but fateful visit, John flew back home from Albany and continued to exchange letters with Vivian. In the spring of 1965, however, a new development had unfolded in her life. She had met a new man who she planned to marry — just as soon as he secured a divorce.

“She wouldn’t be able to write anymore. OK, that’s fine. I burned her letters and wrote it off,” he said.

Almost a year later, around Valentine’s Day of 1966, John finally received his next letter. Vivian’s plans had collapsed, and the man she intended to marry never got a divorce. To add insult to injury, he’d swindled money for a “savings account” that he was spending betting on horses at the Saratoga Race Course, and he was a wanted fugitive for nonpayment of child support.

The regular correspondence picked up right where it left off, and from that moment on, John noted, Vivian told her everything with complete candor. In 1967 or 1968, he made another trip out to New York, this time spending a week there, and even after an extended conversation between Vivian and a man at the bowling alley bar left him nervous again, John kissed her goodbye before he returned home.

They kept writing to each other, but when she invited him out to New York again, John had a different idea: it was time for her to make a trip to Iowa. Due to her fear of flying, Vivian and a few of her cousins decided to make it a road trip, and in 1971, she finally arrived.

“This next week, I remember it like it was last week. It was a Sunday. My parents had gone on a mini vacation because Anne, at that time, could go to Camp Sunnyside for a week. That was her chance to have a break,” John said. “I’m home alone on a Sunday watching the Cubs, and the doorbell rings in the middle of the afternoon. Here’s Vivian and these other three girls, they had come to Iowa and they found me.”

John was enrolled in a veterans farm class at Marshalltown Community College (MCC) that met three nights a week, and when he came home that Monday night, she was waiting for him after her cousins had gone to bed. They’d stay up late on the couch talking and “getting along great,” and the next day, she hit him with a bombshell. She asked him to get married.

As a 33-year-old bachelor, John was a bit shocked that it had happened so suddenly, but after quickly weighing the pros and the cons, he knew it was all he wanted to do. By Wednesday morning, he had accepted, and they planned a wedding in 10 days.

Vivian bought her dress at the now-defunct Willard’s store in downtown Marshalltown. John notified his parents of their intentions once they returned, and she wrote a letter to her boss giving her two weeks’ notice along with another to her mother. If they were going to be making their home in Iowa, however, the groom-to-be insisted on getting married in New York.

The happy newlyweds quickly added to the family, which already included Vivian’s daughter Deborah, with twins Michael and Michele, who were born on July 7, 1972 — 30 years to the day after John’s twin sisters had been born.

Michele had heard the unconventional story of how her parents met and eventually came together at least half a dozen times, but never in as much detail as her father told it earlier this week from his apartment at The Embers, where he’s lived since November. Unfortunately, the circumstances were less than ideal: after struggling with Parkinson’s Disease and a pinched nerve in her back for years, Vivian passed away on Dec. 8 at the age of 80 at the Iowa River Hospice house. The couple had made a home just north of State Center for decades until Vivian’s falls forced them into assisted living at Glenwood Place in Marshalltown. Another fall landed her in the memory care unit, and a severe stroke on Dec. 4 led her to hospice, where she spent the final four days of her life.

Anne never fully recovered from her injuries (in spite of it, she communicated with her loved ones through hand signals), but her parents took care of her up until her father Arnold died in 1984. From there, she spent time at the old county home that’s now the sheriff’s office/jail complex, and when that closed, she moved to Southridge Specialty Care and lived there until she passed away at the age of 73 in 2017. Vivian’s daughter Deborah lost a child with heart defects at the age of nine months, and Deborah herself died suddenly of a blood clot while at church in 2010 at the age of 48.

Amidst all of the seemingly too good to be true details of the story, there’s one more to share. On the day Vivian died, John had made arrangements with an employee of the bank in State Center to deposit a check for nursing home insurance in his wife’s name. It came in a day earlier than expected, and he made arrangements with the employee, who was planning to be in Marshalltown, to meet in the front lobby at The Embers.

Just a few hours after learning after his wife’s passing, he noticed the woman had a baby in the backseat of the vehicle she pulled up in, and after she brought the child in, who he later found out belonged to the employee’s cousin, they made the exchange as promised.

“She doesn’t have grandchildren. Her kids are still in school. Anyway, she came in. I gave her the check and the deposit. I looked at this baby and she said ‘This baby’s name is Vivian,'” John said. “That’s just the beginning. It’s wide-eyed, about two months old, a real little thing. I said ‘Hi Vivian.’ She had the biggest smile you could (imagine). That smile was not the baby. That smile was my Vivian telling me that I’m OK. I’m in Heaven. I’m with my Lord. Don’t worry about me. That brought me such peace of mind to know that she is with her Lord.”

Vivian’s body has been cremated, and half of her ashes will remain in Iowa with John, while the other half will return to New York where she will be reunited with her first husband and their late daughter.

A special thanks to Monica Fulton at the Marshalltown Public Library, who assisted in finding the articles from the T-R archives.