Story image for love story from Newsday Love story: Andrea and David Schmutter, Oceanside

Andrea Schmutter of Oceanside recalls her early courtship with husband David.

I love telling our story to my friends and family. We met, or rather fell in love, in 1975 at Brookwood Camps, a sleepaway camp in Glen Spey, New York. Actually, we first met in April 1975 at a fellow camper’s Sweet 16 party. My name was Andrea Kaplan then. I thought David was very cute. He was 17 and I was 15.

I had been attending Brookwood Camps for the past six summers. David was a waiter there. The camp was divided into boys’ and girls’ sections, including the canteen, but we participated in many camp-wide activities. The first week of camp, I saw David again playing in a waiters versus counselors basketball game and was struck by Cupid’s arrow. He noticed me too, and very quickly we became an item.

recommended reading
66 LI couples share their love stories

We’d meet at a tree that marked the boundary between the boys’ and girls’ camps and would walk hand in hand to the canteen and to events.

After we returned home, David called me for a date. He drove his blue Chevy Nova from his home in Queens to mine in Brooklyn, where he met my parents. They liked him right away. We dated and kept in touch after David left for Syracuse University, always knowing that we’d eventually end up together.

David proposed in 1981. I was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology and he was at New York Law School. One rainy night, he arrived at my house with Baskin-Robbins ice cream. When I said I didn’t want any, my parents, aware of the proposal and eavesdropping, came into the room. My Dad asked me to serve him ice cream. So I opened the container and found several containers nestled inside each other. The last one held the engagement ring.

We married on Nov. 27, 1982, and stayed two nights at The Plaza Hotel in Manhattan after our wedding. David had his law school exams, so we postponed our honeymoon to St. Martin until February 1983.
Get the Newsday Now newsletter!