As a high school senior in 1960, Bruce Grossetta invited Gail Price to his sister’s 16th birthday party.
And that was it.
He knew.
“Early this school year when I first asked you out, I was just planning to have an evening of fun with a nice girl I had met at school,” he wrote on Jan. 3, 1961. “When that evening was over, you can’t imagine the feelings that were running through my mind. You were the kind of girl I had dreamed about and knew just couldn’t exist, yet there you were...”
Bruce never mailed that letter to Gail, but continued to ask her on dates. Today, that letter adorns the back cover of the couple’s new book “Cadet Letters: A Love Story.”
“That’s pretty romantic,” he jokes, as Gail, 73, reads the letter aloud at the kitchen table in their Tucson home more than 50 years later.
Their friendship and interest in each other persisted beyond their 1961 graduation from Catalina High School and through Bruce’s departure for the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado.
For the next four years, Bruce and Gail wrote letters to each other, chronicling their triumphs and struggles at the Air Force Academy and the University of Arizona, respectively.
They married within weeks of graduating both institutions.
In October 2015, they self-published “Cadet Letters: A Love Story,” archiving the hundreds of epistles exchanged during that first, 1961-to-1962 school year.
Gail writes on struggling to study for UA exams, and Bruce bemoans the hundreds of disciplinary pushups. In just about 400 pages — including photographs Bruce took with a camera gifted to him by his grandmother and letters from Bruce to his family — Gail Price and Bruce Grossetta fall in love.
“He wrote every week to his parents and to me, and at that time, he was very committed to me,” Gail says. “But I wasn’t committed yet.”
That changed over their first Christmas break, when Gail visited Bruce with his family.
“You’re there and they’re in uniforms and there are balls, and it was a really fun time,” Gail says. “And I had gone to college and found out that a lot of boys just want you to smoke and drink and party, and I wasn’t like that.”
They had only ink and paper to express deepening feelings, resulting in hundreds of letters scribbled and typed over four years. Only the first year is in the book.
“We got to the end of one year and we were already at 400 pages, and we decided that was enough...” Gail says. “We have three more years of the developing relationship that we’re eager to read.”
“A real love story”
In 51 years of marriage, those first letters have traveled with the Grossettas around the world.
For 26 years, Bruce, now 73, served as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, and after retirement he worked as a commercial pilot for Southwest Airlines.
About five years ago, Gail decided to open the trunk and read the letters for the first time in almost 50 years. She found about 600.
“I always knew I wanted to do something with (the letters), but I didn’t know what,” she says. “My philosophy is just get started. You can always make it better later.”
She spent about two years transcribing on her own.
“It was her idea and her project — it kept her off the streets,” Bruce says with a laugh. “In the last year-and-a-half, she was really bogged down, so then I began to pitch in and help out.”
As they read the letters again, the memories of their younger selves returned.
“What was also amazing was we would never have recalled many of the things we had written,” Bruce says. “I kept saying, ‘I don’t remember that.’”
To format the book’s design and photographs, Gail initially sought the help of employees at the La Encantada Apple Store.
There, the couple connected with Karl Moeller, an employee. When he left the store, they stayed in touch. On and off for two years, Moeller, who now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, helped the Grossettas figure out formatting and self publishing.
“Some people look too good to be true, but these guys aren’t,” Moeller says. “They really are what they present. They’re an all-American success story and a real love story.”
Life abroad
The letter writing continued throughout Bruce’s Air Force career, though Gail and their daughter Holly Grossetta Nardini traveled with him whenever possible.
Gail wishes now that she had dug up the original letters the first time Bruce went to Southeast Asia for the Vietnam War.
In Bruce’s 10 months overseas, his squadron lost 10 planes. Gail waited at home, pregnant with Holly and writing for the Tucson Citizen.
She thinks she could write a novel based on their time in Vietnam — especially the second trip when she and 6-year-old Holly followed Bruce after the fighting had calmed.
Bruce’s career stationed them in North America, Asia, South America and Europe. During a 10-year period, they lived in Italy, England and Germany. He retired as a colonel.
Gail kept busy abroad, but the travel meant no true career of her own. As an Air Force wife — especially when Bruce was twice a squadron commander — she entertained and planned events for the other women.
She volunteered and ran side businesses. In the Philippines, she ran a gift store and was a buyer for USO shops. In Italy, she managed a bazaar. She also earned her master’s degree in personnel management from Troy University in Alabama.
She suspects she would have enjoyed a career, but it wasn’t the priority.
“We couldn’t have been together if I had a career,” she says. “And that’s what we wanted.”
Tucson roots
Bruce and Gail always planned to return to Tucson.
The Grosettas and Tucson go all the way back to 1880.
“My great grandfather came here on the railroad the same year the railroad came to Tucson,” Bruce says. “He was from Croatia and became very prominent in Tucson.”
Anthony Vincent Grossetta opened grocery and hardware stores, built the Tucson Opera House and served in the Arizona Territorial Legislature, the Tucson City Council, the University of Arizona Governing Board and as the first president of the Tucson Light and Power Co.
An avenue downtown between East Alameda Street and East Toole Avenue is named for the family.
Beyond returning to family roots, settling down in Tucson gave Gail a chance to go to work.
While Bruce continued to travel — sometimes with his wife — as a Southwest Airlines pilot for 10 years, Gail began work as an adjunct faculty member at Pima Community College teaching cross cultural relations and international business. She also started a global-minded consulting business and began serving on boards around Tucson.
In retirement, the couple continues to travel, usually for three months at the time. A map in their home has pins dotting the 160 countries they have visited.
“Life is so good,” Gail says. “We’re 73, but I just don’t think we’re elderly. We’re still middle-aged and fit and have great fun.”
They hike, swim, play golf and tennis. For 12 years, they have ballroom danced — not to compete, but “just for us,” Gail says.
“He never changed
an iota”
At Bruce’s 50th reunion with the Air Force Academy’s class of 1965, the Grossettas distributed copies of their book to classmates.
Full of names, dates and descriptions, the letters are a record of the early years of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
“He’s an American hero for sure, and she’s his high school sweetheart,” Moeller says. “Come on. Who can resist that?”
For Holly Grossetta Nardini, these letters are also a glimpse of her parents 50 years ago.
“It was just really revelatory to come face to face with a whole chapter of your parents’ history,” Grossetta Nardini, 48, says. “Even though I knew the broad outlines of the story and I was told all along about them meeting, I had never had the nitty-gritty and textural feel of what it was like.”
The letters also gave Grossetta Nardini, who now lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and their four kids, a look at her parents’ relationships with their parents and siblings — an added layer of family history.
The Grossettas published almost everything in those letters. Any content omitted was to avoid repetition, not preserve reputations. There’s nothing too personal in those early letters anyways.
It’s the later stuff that gets better, Gail laughs. And those letters will stay within the family.
“We got to know each other through the letters, but then when we got married, we had never been together,” Gail says.
But Bruce interjects that letters can be more expressive than spoken words.
He must be right.
Fifty years later, the Grossettas still enjoy a marriage full of fun, teamwork, self-sacrifice and celebrations.
And they know they have something special.
Gail’s voice still softens when she reads the letter Bruce never sent.
“I treasure this,” she says. “And he never changed an iota. It’s even better now. I’m just too fortunate.
