Moosehead Lakeshore Journal 2-6-25 Edition
By Shelagh Talbot
Mary Ann Kirby and Phillip Hilderbrand were a couple of teens when they first met in Germany. Their fathers were in the Army and based out of the Rhien-Main near Frankfurt. Her dad was an officer, while Phil’s was a civilian engineer with the Army. At that time, it was only natural for servicemen stationed abroad to bring along their families to live on base. There could be as many 3,000 officers, and as many as 10,000 civilians, stationed there at the same time. The odds of this young couple ever meeting were pretty slim to begin with.
“And Phil was one of those cool guys,” Mary Ann reminisced. She was a shy girl of 13 and he was in high school. He had long hair and was tall and cute and he played bass (a Hofner like Paul MacCartney no less!) in a band with his brother. “It was all ‘60s and ‘70s classic rock,” Mary Ann smiled. Their meeting would have never happened, except she was intrigued enough to flat-out ask his sister, Mary Ann’s best friend, about him. She remarked, “Eeeew, you like my brother?”
Their romance took wings with the kind of tender passion only a teenage first-love experience could. Then, like in the tale of Romeo and Juliet, they were to be separated. Her father was moving to a base near Naples. He did not particularly approve of their relationship anyway– he considered Phil a hippie and he felt that by accepting this post, his daughter would forget the lanky musician once and for all. But she did not.
Mary Ann remembers the two of them sobbing at the airport when she had to leave for good. They promised to write each other, and she wrote copious heartfelt letters to him. Unfortunately, none of those letters actually reached Phil. They had been intercepted by his older sister and tossed away. She might have thought at the time she was sparing her brother more heartbreak.
Mary Ann, for her part, knew she and Phil shared a deep, forever kind of love together, no matter how the circumstances of life played out. But Phil, not hearing a peep from Mary Ann, figured she didn’t care a fig about him. He resigned himself to this unhappy state of affairs and buried himself into his schooling. When he graduated from Frankfurt high school with a concentration in cabinetmaking, his sister persuaded him to return to his family in Georgia and pursue his craft in the US.
Despite all the turmoil and confusion life can hand out, Mary Ann never stopped thinking of Phil, so when she turned 18 and was independent, she decided to try and find him. Hopes high, she and a good friend took a train from Naples to Frankfurt. “But he had left. He wasn’t there,” Mary Ann said, sorrow tinging her voice. “So, all we could do was consider it a travel trip and get on with our lives.”
By then, Mary Ann was living in Naples. She was working for the Navy when she met her husband-to-be, a native Italian. “He was quite handsome, and my teenaged self wanted to get back at Phil for abandoning me,” she said. They married and moved to Modena where she had two children, a boy and a girl. At the same time, Phil also married and had two children, a boy and a girl! His reputation as a master cabinet maker attracted much business, and his company, Peach State Cabinets, flourished.
Time passed and life when on. Then, Phil’s wife suffered several strokes and passed away. Meanwhile, Mary Ann had also moved back to the states years before. Her marriage had unraveled, and she was a single mom. Then, a wonderful moment of kismet occurred: she and Phil found each other again via Facebook. They messaged each other back and forth until eventually they got together once again. “It was like we’d never been apart,” Mary Ann recalled. Of all the places the pair lived, they ended up having a wonderful wedding (I know because I was there!) in Greenville, Maine, and they bought a house together. Mary Ann’s son lived upstairs with his wife and their young daughters. It was a very happy, busy time.
Phil had suffered with cancer before he and Mary Ann reunited, and unfortunately, it resurfaced. He and Mary Ann were understandably devastated as their lives tilted. Nevertheless, she was able to arrange a last trip overseas with Phil to revisit all the places where they had given their hearts to each other. He passed in the autumn of that year, but it was that last excursion that brought their relationship full circle, always and forever.