The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, California • Page 3

THI SUN-TCIICAM A-3 (Tit Aug. 27, 1971 Why he loved her ary Shiminski Sunday .1 4 1 1 i T'i i I "My rr.o'kfr nA He i rrar What are gf.r.g to tn.r.k'' I didn gfrl rr.ir.y Mau'-fc of the :g.o, tie Mary aid 'I went to Nr York. But rr.y rr.vhK got te time Every time ihe :gf.ed a check or n-'ept prle at her fur.r.v They i fare at hf-r" Later. Mary would i-ay aout tie sign. "I wa rr.ad and et I wai very glad It was cray Mary eventually agreed to become Bert wife if ouldk her fathf-r for her hind Whv did she make him leap ti last hurdle' Why not?" she aA-smirking Two weeks later, on Aug 8.

they were married in South Carolina The couple made the decision quickly, loaded their car with the three children, the $600 guard dog. an ice cooler and an air mattress. They took the nearly 1.000-mile trip because "there's no blood test required in South Carolina and so you don't have to wait." Bert explained. "We thought if we waited very long even a day or two there'd be another argument and we'd never get married." Unknown to the Salvas. finding out who painted the message and ho it as intended for became an obsession with several New Engenders.

Dayton Duncan, assistant news editor of the Keene. Sentinel, searched two years for Mary Shiminski. digging through old tax records, phone books, high school registers, post office files, following tips and leads that led him nowhere. Finally, after being convinced twice that there was no Mary Shiminski and that it was all a sham. Duncan got a breakthrough, he said in a telephone interview-last week.

Someone claimed to know a Shiminski in Westminster, Vt. Finally, through property and tax rolls, Duncan came up ith a Long Island, New York, telephone number for Mary Shiminski. That Mary Shiminski. however, turned out to be the mother of the on the bridge over Route 9 near Battleboro, Vt. The famous sign he'd come over to the house," Mary said.

"They (the men) would spend the weekends together. They ere both truckers and they Russian," Bert interrupts, punctuating the syllables with a slight Puerto Rican accent. "Waddya mean, Russian?" Mary shoots back in a surly voice, biting down on the last word. "Your uncle said She jumps in, "He's crazy!" "Well, your aunt "What does she know?" "Well they both Suddenly, the intense stares Bert and Mary have been exchanging across the kitchen table disappear into laughter. "Ya see?" Mary asks.

"That's the way it used to be, all the time." "It was crazy. I thought I was losing my mind," Bert said. But he was persistent, headstrong and knew what he wanted. Mary now smiles happily at these traits. "Ya, I was glad he did what he did.

Even though I could have killed him sometimes! The things he did, you wouldn't believe!" And Bert wasn't above meddling in her affairs with other people. Once when they broke up, Mary dated another man. That courtship didn't last though, Mary said. "Oh no. He took care of that.

He filled the guy's gas tank with sand. I never saw the guy again. "Bert was always chasing me around, following me around, trying to get back together," she said with a heavy northeastern twang. But sometimes chasing Mary was risky, Bert said. "I've bled a couple of times nothin' serious though," he admitted.

Mary said she would throw things at him, "anything that was handy, an iron, a screwdriver, a knife. Once I stuck him with a big meat fork." But in the back of their minds, Mary said, "we were both hoping that it would all work out." The couple never realized their relationship was out of the ordinary. "We thought what we do obviously everybody else does. But I guess they don't," Mary said. Their plans to get married always ended in the same argument: she wanted to live in Vermont and he wanted to settle in Pennsylvania.

Neither would budge an inch. So, after going through lvz years of quarrels and fights, Mary took the $1,500 engagement ring Bert gave her and pawned it for $600. She took all that money and bought Tasha, a husky German shepherd trained to attack on command "I got her to keep him away!" But that didn't work, either. Undaunted. Bert would bring buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken to Mary's house, carefully place the chicken under the dog's nose and slip into the house, usually leaving in a huff with the battle scars of yet one more clash.

How did it all begin? In 1970 Bert was the best friend of Jack who then was Mary's husband. And Mary hated Bert. "Two, three, four times a week (Continued from A-l) plea when his relationship with Mary Shiminski seemed doomed. Armed with seven cans of black paint and five cans of white paint, Salva teetered on a narrow ridge of steel at the base of the bridge, some 30 feet above the ground. For the next 6 hours, under cover of night, he painted.

Gripping the top of the bridge with one hand, he used the other to spray the 40-foot-long stretch of steel with black paint, masking out all the blemishes of previous graffiti artists. Then, dodging the probing lights of highway patrol officers, Salva carefully painted the three-foot high letters. And, to make sure she would not mistake who left the hard-to-miss note, he initialed it, "BS." Today, the 33-year-old woman laughs uproariously as she talks with Salva about the torrent of speculation his inscription sparked. His motive was simple: marriage. But Salva, 40, and his wife greatly underestimated the impact the message would have on New Eng-landers and, ultimately, the rest of the country.

Now, there are "Mary Shiminski I Love You!" T-shirts; a book of lyrics entitled "Mary Shiminski I Love You! and Other Poems," and, finally, a song about the couple's rough-and-tumble romance. In the two years after the message appeared, it also inspired a Brattleboro minister's sermon on love; Mary Shiminski and her unknown suitor were the focus of a college student's poem in a literary magazine at Keene State College, N.H.; and a New Hampshire photographer took a picture of the desperate plea and made thousands of postcards that found their way to mailboxes across the country. The romance of Bert and Mary captured the imagination of a Hollywood writer who recently produced a screenplay. The love note remained untouched by graffiti artists for two years but in 1976, its letters began to fade. Celebrities overnight, the Salvas have gotten telephone calls and "more mail than you could imagine" from people who are happy the couple did the unexpected: They got married.

Mary Shiminski's marriage to Salva was the last thing relatives, friends and the couple expected. Anyone acquainted with the pair knew they fought and bickered constantly. The relationship was turbulent "That's putting it mildly," Mary laughs as she shrugs her shoulders. The problem? Mary simply refused to marry Bert. As he explains now, "She was fighting fate, I wasn't." Although neither one knows what all the arguments were about, it's easy to see how a tenacious verbal bout could erupt between the two New Yorkers.

The Salvas say they hardly ever fight or argue now, but a "day out of the past," as Mary put it, nearly surfaced during a recent interview in the couple's rustic farmhouse: Mary said she was of Polish descent. "No, you're half Polish and half Charles (Continued from A-l) Caron. He had no vanity about his appearance and willingly played roles in which he looked older than he was, even at times appearing without his toupee if the character called for it. Perhaps he is best remembered by the public for his role as the thiof Pepe LeMoko in "Algiers." Mimics later mimed him with the line he supposedly used to lure Heddy Lamarr: "Come with me to the Casbah." Actually, Boyer never issued the Invitation to the Casbah, and neither did anyone else in the film. Leading ladies he courted in films as he rose to fame included Greta Garbo, Irene Dunne, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Claudette Colbert and Jennifer Jones, as well as Miss Lamarr.

The films that brought him fame in early year were "Caravan" in 1934; "Private Worlds," "Shanghai" and "Break of Hearts" in 1935; "Le Bonheur" and "Garden of Allah" in 1936; then "History is Made at Night," "Mayerling," "Conquest," "Tovarich and "Algiers." During these years he kept in touch with France, later returned and served in the French army until December 1939, when he was released and returned to Hollywood. There, he became a rallying point for the Free French movement in the United States. Among his later films were "Is Paris Burning," "How to Steal a git 5 A 1 i he was better'n anybody else. I didn't like that." But in 1972 Mary got divorced After the divorce Mary dropped her ex-husband's last name and took back her maiden name, Shiminski. Three months later, the bitterness between Mary and Bert began to melt when he offered to take Mary and her three small children to the beach and movies.

"I found out he was not such a bad egg and I started seeing him alone," Mary said. They were engaged in December 1973, but the clincher came the next summer when Bert agreed to meet Mary and her family at their vacation trailer in Westminster. Vt. Just 10 miles away, in New Hampshire, was Spofford Lake here the Shiminskis would go to swim and where Mary often would go to "hide" from Bert. At the last minute, Bert realized be had to deliver some goods out of state.

"We all had our vacations together at the same time." Mary said. "The kids, my parents. We were all going to be together. Then he comes up with this baloney that he had to take a load somewhere. So I said.

Go and forget it and don't come And I went myself. "I just got tired of the arguments because I thought, it's always going to be like this. We've been at it lt years now. The hell with it. "I refused to talk to him." That night Bert decided to paint the famous message to Mary, a last-ditch effort to prove his love.

"I decided to paint that bridge because they had to go over that road to get to Spofford Lake," he said. "And I knew she would see it." Later that morning, she did. "And I couldn't believe it: "I almost died! My first thought was. 'God! Look at this: He's crazy." Her mother became angry hen she learned of the sign; her name also is Mary Shiminski. news Three balloonists welcomed home ALBUQUERQUE.

M. (AP -Albuquerque welcomed home its three trans-Atlantic balloonists Saturday as thousands surged toward them at airport ceremonies and show ered them ith confetti during a three-mile motorcade through city streets. Ben Abruzzo, 48; Maxie Anderson, 44. and Larry New man. 31, returned to a tumultuous reception nine days after their silver-topped, heiium-filled Double Eagle II landed in a field 55 miles west of Paris, completing the first trans-Atlantic balloon crossing.

Brazil will hike price of coffee RIO DE JANEIRO. Brazil (AP) Brazil will increase the minimum export price for its coffee from $1.50 a pound to $1 60 dollars starting Monday, the Brazilian Coffee Institute announced. The new price will be in effect until November 30. the announe-ment Saturday said. It was not immediately known what affect this will have on the retail price of coffee in the United States and other countries.

worked on the trucks and told truck stories, "He (Salva) was a snot, I thought. He was arrogant, ya know Like Stof photo by Ron Mann Postal (Continued from A Friday night but reported no progress in resolving the dispute. Postal strikes are illegal under federal law. The judge's order does not apply to the mail handlers union which unlike the tw larger unions has not mandated a strike if negotiations are not resumed within five days. APWU President Emmet Andrews said Friday that he was joining J.

Joseph Vacca. president of the letter carriers union, in calling on the Postal Service to renegotiate the July 21 pact. However, the Postal Service flatly refused to reopen negotiations. The five-day period before leaders of the letter carriers union are authorized to call a strike ends Monday. The APWU's five-day period ends Tuesday.

Both the Postal Service and the Pentagon have prepared con-' tingency plans for moving the mails in he event of a strike. Hanoi turns over remains of airmen HANOI, Vietnam (AP Vietnam, seeking closer bonds with its former foe the United States, gave a U.S. congressional delegation the remains of 11 American airmen killed in the Indochina war. The ceremony ended a six-day visit by eight congressmen to Vietnam and Laos. Bert and Mary Shiminski-Saiva at their Riverside home.

Hugging his mom is one of the twins, Bert Jr. Boyer dead Mary Shiminski. but Duncan was able to track the real one to Riverside. When he called the Salvas on Father's Day, the couple was shocked to learn of the confusion the message had spawned. Today the couple say they couldn't be happier.

Bert is no longer an independent trucker. And there are no more fights about him making interstate deliveries because he now works regular hours as a driver for the Georgia Pacific Co. in Riverside. Most arguments now solve themselves. Mary said, recalling the one clash that did erupt when they moved to Riverside and she became pregnant.

"If I had a boy he wanted to name him Orlando and I wanted to name him Bert. "Well. I had twins," Mary said, beaming. "Orlando and Bert. See? Everything just seems to ork out now." "I wouldn't have done hat I did for any other woman." Bert said, lounging at the kitchen table.

"But I'm glad I did it for her." Trying to duck the flattery, Mary bows her head slightly "Me too," she said. "Me too." 3 in brief Shroud of Turin goes on exhibit Ne York Times Nes Service ROME A long strip of linen believed by many to be the shroud used to wrap the body of Jesus after his crucifixion went on one of its rare exhibits Saturday in Turin. More than 3 million pilgrims, tourists, scientists, photographers are expected to file past the the shroud in the Turin cathedral dedicated to St. John. The exhibit ill last until Oct.

8. Floods in Manila cause 10 deaths New Yern T'res News Serv.ce MANILA Ten persons drowned and dose to 15.000 families had to evacuate their homes in the central Luzon region north of here when continuous heavy rains brought heavy flooding, it was learned Saturday from the Red Cross. Bridges and roads in central Luzon, some two hours' drive north of Manila, were under water. The road to Baguio City, where the 1978 world chess championship is in progress, became impassable with landslides. i I V.

1 vision. It grew into Four Star Television. Boyer. who was born in Figeac, France, found himself an actor at the age of 7. when he began getting major parts in school plays.

The son of a farm machinery dealer, Boyer used his father's granary as a theater, and, at age 12, learned pasages of long plays and rehearsed with self-written plays. He later satisfied his appetite for acting with a balanced fare of stage, films and television. He was a man who knew how to capitalize on natural attributes. In his case they were smoky eyes, fine features and a French accent he never lost, even after he became a U.S. citizen in 1942.

As charming off screen as on. he and his wife, who had lived in Paradise Valley, a suburb of Phoenix, for the past year, were leading figures in Hollywood society. His only child, Michael, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1965 at the age of 21. That tragedy, which the coroner's office ruled suicide, stunned Boyer, who a week before had said of Michael, "I'm trying to help him find himself." Graveside funeral services for Boyer, who had no survivors, ill be held this week at the Inglew ood Mortuary in Inglewood, Calif. The date has not been set yet.

Charles Boyer photo taken in 1968 Million," "Casino Rovale and "Barefoot in the Park." Boyer also proved himself an artist of stature on Broadway, starring in "Don Juan in Hell" in 1951, two years later in "Kind Sir" and in "Lord Pengo' in 1962. In 1951, he entered partnership with actors Dick Powell and David Niven and actress Ida Lupino. Their first effort was the Four Star Playhouse anthology of tele-.