A high school romance rekindles: Mike Hazard ’69 and Anne Cannon ’70 share their love story

They each only spent one school year at ASL: 1967–68. But the ASL community looks after their own, as Anne and Mike fondly recall, and a carefully orchestrated encounter made that one year count more than either could ever have imagined. Fifty-eight years after their first meeting (and kiss) at a Belgravia pub, and 57 after they drifted apart and left London, Anne and Mike are back together—and happier than ever.

“It was an afternoon sometime—maybe in the girls’ locker room,” Anne remembers. “A friend of mine, Nora, approached me, and told me that there was this very cute boy in Grade 11, and I had to meet him. Nora’s boyfriend at the time—Rick—knew Mike from the soccer team.”

It was the fall of 1967, and Anne and Mike were both new to London. Mike had just joined ASL from Philadelphia at the start of Grade 11, while Anne had been at an international school in Buenos Aires prior to her family’s move to London. 

Being in different grades (which often meant classes in different buildings, in those early days of ASL!), Anne and Mike had not even chanced upon each other until their arranged meeting at the now-defunct Pig and Whistle pub in Belgravia—which Nora, Rick and other, longer-established Eagles had organized to bring the two together.

“I think we both delighted in one another’s smiles,” Anne remembers. “The next thing I knew, we were in a lip lock at the Pig and Whistle!”

Anne and Mike, sitting side by side on a video call from Mike’s Minneapolis home, look at one another with pure adoration, and they laugh, only mildly abashed. 

“From that moment, we were a couple,” Anne says. (And not just “a” couple: Anne and Mike were widely known by their classmates as “the cute couple,” as the parting wishes scrawled across the pages of Anne’s 1967–68 yearbook attest en masse.) 

The “cute couple” spent a blissful year together, aside from a brief wintertime breakup, the details of which neither remembers. In any case, they were back together in time for prom. “I remember a corsage that I very awkwardly tried to pin on you,” Mike says, looking at Anne. She remembers that too. “After the prom,” Anne adds, “One of my classmates hosted a group of us to party on at the Playboy Club.”

With a memorable night at prom and the Playboy Club behind them, Anne and Mike’s first and only year at ASL drew to a close, and spring gave way to a beautiful London summer. 

Anne’s parents had decided to send her to Dana Hall, an all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts, for grades 11 and 12, while Mike and his family were to return to Philly ahead of his final year of high school. The pair’s memories of that summer together—the summer of 1968—are as hazy as they are asymmetrical. 

Neither has any memory of a breakup. All they know for sure is that they drifted apart, and each moved back to the US, where they would not interact again—until 48 years later.

On New Year’s Eve 2015, Anne searched Mike’s name on Facebook. “I had been carrying this weight in my spirit, because I had treated this really nice boy badly, and he didn’t deserve it,” Anne says. “I sent him a private message apologizing for my behavior.”

“I have no memory whatsoever of that side of the story,” Mike clarifies, with a chuckle of slight disbelief.

When she sent that message of apology on the eve of 2016, Anne was single, and had sworn off relationships for good. “And Mike was about to get married to the love of his life,” she adds.

“Anne and I each have one child—now I also have a grandchild,” Mike explains, and so, as the two began to trade Facebook messages, “it was a history of relationships and divorces and life and things we love and jobs…”

“Short histories,” the pair agree. 

“I wished him luck, and love. We wished each other good tidings—and that was it for several years,” Anne says. “Eight years,” says Mike. 

When Mike’s wife, Tressa, passed away in 2024, Anne reached out to Mike again; this time, to share her condolences and to encourage him to attend his ASL classmates’ 55th reunion, which she knew was happening in Eureka, CA, in October.

“The word Anne used in that first invitation was that it might be ‘healing’ for me to go to a reunion,” Mike says, but he was unsure. It would be a long and pricey trip from Minneapolis to California; he was mourning the loss of his wife; and none of his closest ASL friends would be there. 

But when David, a friend of Mike’s from the media world—Mike is a filmmaker, teaching artist and nonprofit director; while Anne worked as an accountant at the start of her career, later becoming an investor, philanthropist and long-serving trustee of Occidental College—offered to fly him out to his Morro Bay, CA, home in mid-September as a “grief gift,” Mike accepted. 

“I reached out to Anne again through Facebook, and said I was going to be in Morro Bay, thinking it was maybe an hour from Pasadena” (where Anne lives), “and an hour from San Francisco.” (In fact, Morro Bay is about three hours north of the former and equidistant from the latter.) Mike suggested they meet up somewhere halfway between Morro Bay and Pasadena.

“More or less immediately,” though, Anne offered to pick up Mike in Morro Bay and drive him up to San Francisco at the end of his weekend with David. “As I put it, ‘If you are brave enough to be captive in my vehicle,’” Anne recalls with a laugh. 

She envisioned what it would mean for the drive to go south—if only figuratively—and the awkwardness, then, of having to let Mike out on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway to fend for himself. 

“We had not even talked: it had all been typing,” Mike emphasizes. “As we started coordinating and discussing, we were getting into a kind of… synchronization. You couldn’t call it romance, but it was definitely…”

“…We were playful with one another in our exchange,” Anne smiles.

“By this time, she had also offered to pick me up in San Francisco and share a motel room with her,” says Mike.

“Two beds!” Anne chimes in. A chaste motel invitation. Again, they laugh.

By the night before Mike flew to California, their conversation had moved from Facebook to text. “She texted, ‘Are we ever gonna talk?’, and I said ‘We will!’” 

“I responded, ‘Now?,’” Anne recalls. 

“So we talked for two hours, and it was immediately comfortable… friendly… silly… playful…,’” Mike says, looking into Anne’s eyes with palpable delight. “It broke the ice,” she confirms.

The plot, Mike felt as he flew out west, had thickened.

A few days later, precisely one minute before she was set to collect Mike in Morro Bay, Anne pulled up across the street from the appointed address. “The sun was on her, and it was a woman. She was far away, but it was a Sunday morning. Who else was going to park there?” Mike asks.

Anne and Mike stopped in Salinas for lunch as they made their way north, through the golden hills and valleys of agrarian California. From the first interaction they had with a Salinas pedestrian, whom Mike had asked for a restaurant recommendation, they knew that they shared an uncommonly strong love of conversations with strangers. 

They were pointed toward Salinas’s Main Street, and a diner whose name, incredibly, was “First Awakenings.” At First Awakenings, Anne and Mike sat on the same side of their booth as they ate, finding any excuse to let their hands and shoulders touch and pull back. 

So commenced a “magically mysterious” couple of days in San Francisco, replete with storybook indecision (and decision), long, hilly wanderings, and equally long asides with understanding strangers.

Exhausted by the time the sun was setting on an art-filled Monday, Anne and Mike decided to walk to the wharf, aiming to “reboot” their energy over a glass of wine. Anne also had fresh seafood in mind.

They shared oysters and clams, and Anne invited Mike to walk her back to her hotel. As they walked, they talked about how chaotic the house was where Mike had stayed the night before, and was planning to stay again. (A family friend’s house, it was quite crowded at the time and not entirely equipped to host guests.)

“I took pity on him,” Anne says. “After this lovely day we had, how could I let him go back to all that? So I asked if he would like to stay the night in my hotel—I had two beds, after all.”

“The last thing that Anne said that night, while we were still awake, was, ‘Don’t fall in love with me,’” Mike recalls. “To which I said, ‘It’s too late.’” 

(Anne’s heart, as she kept reiterating, was permanently “under lock and key.” The proverbial key, moreover, had been lost long ago.)

Nevertheless, by the next morning, Mike had made up his mind to fly back to California the next month for his 55th reunion, after all. (“The next morning, he said, ‘Eureka!,’” Anne jokes, and they laugh together at this well-loved joke of theirs.)

Not a single day has gone by since that first night together in the hotel room in San Francisco—five months ago, now—that the two haven’t spoken; often for hours at a time. Every day, they get to know each other again a little bit more.

During those long weeks apart that followed their days in San Francisco, Anne watched Tressa’s celebration of life online. Mike hadn’t sent her a link, but she found and watched it anyway. Seeing Mike eulogize Tressa, Anne fell in love with him despite herself, and texted him immediately to tell him as much.

By the time they reunited in Eureka this past October—for only the second time since their blurry parting in the summer of 1968—Mike and Anne were “like two teenagers in love” all over again.
A month later, in mid-November, Anne visited Mike in Minneapolis to celebrate her birthday. Though Anne and her calendar (and Mike’s calendar, for that matter) agree that that first trip to Minneapolis was only five nights long, Mike remembers it as a wonderful two-week visit. 

“The story that I tell is that she was here for two weeks, and that at the end of those two weeks, she said, ‘I really love it here. I could see myself living here.’” Mike replied, “‘That’s great—and I want to see what Pasadena is like.’” After visiting Anne there in January, Mike said that he could see himself, in fact, moving there. And he very well might.

“It really is a Rashomon,” Mike reflects, ever the filmmaker and ever the romantic. The story of his rekindled relationship with Anne shifts slightly depending on who’s the viewer; who’s the teller. 

It’s also very much that lesser-discussed, but deeply iconic, part of When Harry Met Sally: the series of older couples intercut with the Meg Ryan/Billy Crystal A-plot throughout the rom-com, recounting their own mini love stories direct to camera.

But those “couples”—as dismissive of the fourth wall as they may seem—are, in fact, just actors; their stories all scripted. Anne and Mike are the real deal.