UC Love Stories: Sharon and Bill Drewry

Sharon and Bill Drewry (Class of '92) at the 2010 Sugar Bowl.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner… and what could be a better way for us to celebrate than by sharing some of our favorite UC love stories! Today, we’re bringing you the story of Sharon and Bill Drewry.

To get to the beginning of Sharon (Thieken) and Bill Drewry’s relationship, one must first hear the story of Sharon’s… we’ll call it an “unpredictable” sleep schedule.

Sharon explains, “I'm a pretty laid back person, but I show stress when I sleep, generally by sleep walking or talking.  The night before a big physics test, my roommates and I were up late studying, and I was having a hard time with the material.  Later in the middle of the night, I had a dream that velocity was an object that I had misplaced in our dorm room. 

“I woke up standing in the middle of the room, frantically lifting and looking under everything in sight.  I had completely trashed our room.  All of my roommates were now awake, trying to figure out what I was looking for in such a frenzy.  I woke myself up screaming, ‘I TOLD YOU, I'M LOOKING FOR VELOCITY!!!’ The next morning,  my roommates told half of our freshman engineering class about it. I took a lot of friendly jabs for that one!”

This was in 1987, when Sharon was an engineering major. Cut to 1989… although Sharon had changed her major to personnel and industrial relations, she would soon learn that the “Velocity” incident would follow her throughout her career at UC.

Sharon and some friends were at the Yacht Club – a favorite hangout – when they ran into Bill, whom Sharon only knew as a casual acquaintance with poor penmanship. “We didn’t know each other well, and I could never remember his name. But I knew his handwriting was absolutely horrible, so he was always the ‘guy with the bad handwriting,’ to me,” explains Sharon.

Although Sharon and Bill didn’t know each other well prior to that evening at the Yacht Club, they spent a lot of time plotting exactly how she would set Bill up with one of her roommates, whom Bill was interested in. But fate had other plans: that fall, Sharon and Bill seemed to run into each other everywhere on and off campus. In November, Bill asked Sharon for a date to the Cincinnati Museum Center, followed by views of the city from the observation deck on top of Carew Tower. 

After a few dates, Sharon decided to share her sleep issues with Bill.  “I started to tell him the ‘velocity’ story.  He stopped me mid-way through and said, ‘Oh my God, I'm dating Velocity!’”  Bill, it turned out, had heard the tale of Sharon’s midnight rampage from mutual friends in the same freshman engineering class Sharon and her roommates were in.

“Apparently my notoriety had spread much farther than I thought… it was SO embarrassing,” Sharon says with a smile. 

Despite her status as a bit of an urban legend, Sharon and Bill’s relationship continued its forward-moving “velocity”. Nearly two years after their 1992 graduation, Bill asked Sharon to meet him for dinner in Downtown Cincinnati.

“We met and had dinner at The Palms restaurant,” recalls Sharon. “It was a beautiful evening, so after dinner, Bill suggested that we head up to the Carew Tower observation deck of old times sake. He proposed to me that night above the downtown lights, at the site of our first date. It was very romantic!”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Do you have a great UC love story to share? Comment below and tell us how you met your spouse or significant other at UC! And check back for more in this special series of "UC Love Stories."