UPDATE: March 2021
After Sam and Millie’s story went public in September 2020, they achieved local and national fame! Check out their press coverage below:
- The Gallos’ interview on local news station BR Proud – click here!
- The Gallos are also featured in the New York Times – click here!
The original story follows.
A lot of people wonder why two seniors in a retirement community would get married. For Millie Hathorn and Sam Gallo, it was just meant to be.
Sam moved to St. James Place as a widower about a year after Millie and her husband, who needed special memory care. From his spot in the back of the Duplantier dining room, Sam noticed Millie caring for and loving her husband in a gentle yet strong manner.
They knew each other in passing over the years, but the two didn’t fully connect until Millie’s husband passed in 2018. Sam offered Millie a comforting hug at a time when she didn’t want anyone around her.
“It didn’t bother me when he hugged me, and I didn’t realize that until some time had passed,” Millie said. “I thought he was such a gentleman.”
From there, their love story blossoms.
After seeing him alone in the dining room for so long, Millie began talking with Sam in a unique way. Due to Sam’s hearing loss from his time as Crew Chief on jet planes during the Korean War, he uses the Ava app on his phone to transcribe and converse. The two can communicate so seamlessly that Millie has never thought of him as deaf.
Millie thought Sam needed to meet more people, so she nominated him for Mardi Gras King. When he won the title in February, he invited Millie to join him at the King’s Table during the 2020 St. James Place Mardi Gras Ball.
Their conversations soon upgraded to walks around campus and meals in the dining room. As their relationship continued to grow, they realized they only wanted to be around each other.
One day in March, Millie asked Sam what he wanted of her, to which Sam responded, “I want you for my wife.”
As wedding plans began to unfold, so did the world of a pandemic.
During lockdown, wedding planning consisted of one hoop after another for Millie and Sam. They managed to get their marriage license and held an intimate ceremony on campus with the St. James Place minister, Fr. Jerry Phillips, officiating.
But for the couple, getting married where their love story unfolded was fitting. “We’re so thankful to be at St. James Place,” Millie said. “The campus is gorgeous, the food is so good, and there’s so many activities… you just can express yourself.”
Although they couldn’t attend the ceremony, Sam wrote a letter to his and Millie’s children for a universal answer to an unasked question: Why Marriage?
An excerpt from Sam Gallo’s letter to his children:
A question was not asked by either of you why marriage for Millie or me so late in life made sense. However, it is a deserving question, one I would like to answer here.
There is a saying based on the last line of a poem long lost to me that goes like this, “One’s life has died, when love is done.” Falling in love is a mystery. Yet, the question that love exists, is not a mystery. And as the poem reflected, only at death is love done. Millie and I have both shared with each other the question why? How could it happen? Why us? There is no absolute answer. It is best answered only by a belief in God that the mystery of falling in love was designed in our human nature.
Sam reflects that the love they shared in their previous marriages fulfilled God’s message, who ultimately returned the two to an unmarried state to find each other.
Love was not done with Millie and Sam.
“We both know that together, tomorrow will be an unrepeated opportunity to share the love that God mysteriously gave us as a gift,” Sam said in the letter. “We accept our golden days are numbered, and we are determined to treasure each one as they are given to us. One by one.”