Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [23]
Her mother and uncle were shocked, but saw that she meant it. “We put the pedal to the metal and drove off,” Gloria says. They stopped at a gas station, where Gloria found a pay phone and called the church. Someone tracked down her fiancé. “I can’t do it,” Gloria told him. “I’m so sorry. I just don’t see a future together.”
“But everyone is here, standing around, waiting,” the young man said.
Gloria apologized profusely, wished him well, and never saw him again. Her family covered the cost of the reception that never happened. It was a mortifying experience for Gloria, and she felt awful for her fiancé. Still, she doesn’t regret her decision.
Not settling into an ill-conceived marriage at age twenty would help Gloria become a mother who encouraged her two daughters to dream bigger dreams. She let them know that marriage was a wonderful option, but it didn’t have to happen right away, or at all. It was important that Gabby and her sister, Melissa, make something of their lives, and that they be of service to others. Gabby became a career woman and then a public servant in part because her mother showed her the way.
Gloria never shared her runaway bride story with her daughters when they were young. And she told me why: “If you tell children a story like that, you empower them with a lot of goofiness. A girl might think it was OK to do what I did, when it was actually immature, foolish, impetuous, and immoral.”
After moving on from the canceled wedding, Gloria ended up in Tucson, where she studied at the University of Arizona, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s in fine arts. It was there, in 1963, that she met Spencer, a twenty-eight-year-old local tire dealer. He made her laugh. She made him think. They got married the next year. (For both Spencer and Gloria, their marriage was a fresh start. He had been married briefly to a woman in Mexico and had a son there.)
Spencer’s roots in Tucson went back to 1942, when he was seven years old and his family moved there from New York. His father, born Akiba Hornstein, had contracted the Spanish flu in World War I and was told that if he didn’t find a dry climate, he’d die. The move to Tucson at age forty-two helped save his life.
Akiba’s family tree included a long line of rabbis. In elementary school, a teacher couldn’t pronounce “Akiba” and decided to call him “Gifford.” When he and his two brothers started a business in New York in the 1930s selling home-heating oil burners and fuel, they named it Giffords Oil after him. Every day, customers on the phone wanted to talk to the boss: “Let me talk to Mr. Giffords!” He got tired of saying, “It’s Gifford Hornstein. You can talk to me.” So he decided to change his last name as well. By the time he got to Tucson, Akiba had made things easy for himself by morphing into Gif Giffords.
Gif was a natural salesman and a bit of a huckster who yearned to be a philosopher. For a while, he peddled costume jewelry and hearing aids, and also became a real-estate broker. Then, in 1949, he discovered his calling in the tire business, founding El Campo Tire and Service Centers. Spencer began working there as a teen, pumping gas.
In the 1950s, Gif took to airing commercials for his store on local TV, and each spot would begin with Gif’s signature line: “It’s a good, good evening!” After that catchphrase, he’d deliver homilies or offbeat philosophy.
In one commercial he announced, “You are who you are!” and then in sixty seconds told “the story of the scorpion”: A scorpion was clinging to a piece of wood in a river, and a man came along and rescued it by putting it on the riverbank. Without saying thanks, the scorpion stung the man. “Why did you do that?” the man asked. “I just saved your life.” The scorpion