By Lisa Chmelecki,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Ray Desmarais still isn’t sure if it was her long brown hair, her petite figure or what.

All he knows is that something compelled him to strut across the dance floor in his blue suede shoes and grab hold of Gil Tremblay’s hips.

Before the bashful 15-year-old had a chance to turn around, Ray lifted her up.

Gil squirmed her way down. As soon as her pastel pumps hit the floor, Ray took hold of her hand and swung her around.

A master of the jitterbug herself, Gil decided to go along. But not before telling the cocky 17-year-old what she thought of him.

“What a showoff!”

More than 50 years later, Gil, now 70, realizes that was the wrong thing to say to the man who would one day be her husband.

“That just ticked me off,” Ray said, sitting with his wife at their usual table at Tim Horton’s coffee shop in Lewiston. “As soon as I heard that, I said to myself, Oh yeah, I’ll show you.'”

The band started playing a faster song just in time for Ray to go nuts. He twirled and spun Gil with so much speed that others stopped to watch.

Gil didn’t miss a step.

At the end of the night, she accepted his invitation to a drive-in movie the following Friday.

“I don’t know if it was the dancing or what,” she said, “but there was something that attracted me to him.”

Whatever it was, it stuck.

Gil spent the week planning what she’d wear on their first date. When Ray showed up – “walking in the house as if he owned the place,” Gil said – he was quickly greeted by Mr. Tremblay who demanded to know where Ray was taking his daughter.

The drive-in theater – aka “The Passion Pit” – was not the right answer.

Another night at the local dance hall it would be.

The couple spent nearly every weekend together after that – until about a year later when Ray joined the Air Force to avoid the draft.

“I remember walking him to the train station,” Gil said. “It was the saddest day of my life.”

Ray and Gil stayed in touch, but maintaining a long-distance relationship wasn’t easy. They broke up several times over fights that neither can remember.

“Stupid little things,” Ray said.

In between breakups and makeups, they dated other people. But nothing ever lasted.

One day, Ray called Gil at 3 in the morning.

He had spent the previous night with a student from an all-girls’ college near his base in upstate New York. He took the girl horseback riding, and she was interested in only one thing.

“She was so forward. I couldn’t believe it,” Ray said. “All she wanted was sex.”

The son of strict Roman Catholics, Ray was uncomfortable with his date’s advances.

“So I got to thinking when I got home: Why would I go with a girl like that who is going to be running around on me in no time, when I have this other one waiting for me at home.'”

He reached for the phone. He dialed. Then he blurted out, “Marry me.”

Gil didn’t hesitate.