Home
Phil and Emily Wood
This article is from 'Tulsa People' February 2002 issue

      The winds of war fanned a spark of romance into a burning flame for Phil and Emily Wood. That flame continues to burn brightly more than half a century later.
      Phil, Tulsa city auditor, and Emily, a noted educator, grew up only a mile apart in Chatham, N.J., a town 28 miles outside New York City. Though they attended separate schools, occasionally they would see each other around town and both recall meeting as 15-year-olds at a roller skating party. However, it wasn't until college (he at Princeton, she at Smith) and war loomed, that they began to date seriously.
      "The war actually interrupted our dating," Phil says. "I joined the Army and went into the l0th Mountain Division."
      The pair kept in touch while Phil trained and Emily finished school and worked.
      "We exchanged a lot of correspondence," he says. "Telephone calls were expensive but it only cost three cents to mail a letter."
      The couple still has many of the letters they wrote each other.
      "Letters were really a good way to get to know each other better," Emily says.
      When on leave, Phil visited Emily.
      "I remember him in Grand Central Station in his uniform," she recalls, smiling.
      “It was all very romantic.”
      "The war definitely changed the dynamics," Phil adds. "It accelerated our romantic feelings."
      Before shipping out, Phil took Emily to a jeweler in New York City and bought her a diamond engagement ring.
      "She fainted dead away," he says, chuckling.
      Phil served overseas through August 1945, and on June 22, 1946, the couple married. Together, they raised four children.
      What's been the key to their long, happy union?
      "We both decided long ago that our relationship with each other was the most important thing," Emily says. "We put it ahead of everything else."