She arrived at JFK airport in 1971 and two men were waiting for her. Here's how she ended up married to one of them

George and Linda will celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary later this year. Here they are in their home in Sevenoaks in the U.K., looking back at their wedding day. (Max Burnell/CNN)

The arrivals hall at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 3, 1971, was teeming with people. Among the crowds was 24-year-old Linda Ford, clutching her suitcase, her life about to change forever.

But right then, in that exact moment, Linda wasn’t aware she was on the brink of something. Right then, she simply felt “rather weary.”

Linda was in JFK ahead of starting a year’s teaching post at the City University of New York. She was excited to continue her academic career, to experience a new city – but relocating across the Atlantic was daunting.

Linda knew no one in the United States. While she’d left her home in southeast England before – she’d spent a stint as a postgraduate student in Paris researching the French Revolution – New York City felt particularly far. The transatlantic flight was the longest she’d ever taken. Linda landed, severely jet-lagged and more than a little apprehensive.

“New York is a wonderful city,” Linda tells CNN Travel today. “But it’s a bit fearsome for someone who hasn’t been there before, a woman on her own.”

But Linda was searching for someone in the arrivals hall: George Porter. He was pretty much a stranger – a man she’d never met – but he was a friend of a friend who’d agreed to meet her off the flight.

Linda knew next to nothing about George. But after the mutual acquaintance linked them up, they’d exchanged a couple of transatlantic letters. In Linda’s note, she detailed exactly what she’d be wearing when she arrived at JFK – figuring that information would help George track her down.

“I’ll wear a pink and white top, paired with beige-coloured trousers,” she wrote.

“I have absolutely no idea what I’ll be wearing,” replied George.

Linda arrived in New York City “in precisely the clothes I described.” At the airport, she glanced around, searching the throngs of people. Then her eye landed on two men, standing side by side, both looking at her expectantly.

One was tall, dark-haired, with a moustache and a smile on his face. The other was a dashing employee of Air France, wearing an airline uniform.

“Are you Linda Dean?” asked the dark-haired man. He had a Southern U.S. accent.

Then the second man said hello. He had a French accent.

Linda looked from man to man, bemused.

“I was in the rather strange position of arriving at a very busy airport, in a country I’d never visited before, and being met by not just one, but two very nice young men,” Linda recalls today.

The dark-haired, moustachioed man “was George,” Linda soon realized.

The Air France guy was the wild card. This was Jean-Claude, another friend of a friend who she’d never met, also there, unexpectedly, to greet Linda. Jean-Claude was married, it turned out, to the cousin of a girl Linda had known in Paris.

“I don’t recall exactly how he had found out that I was arriving on this flight, presumably he had the means of looking it up. But he had gone along to meet me as well,” recalls Linda. “He was a very charming Frenchman.”

Jean-Claude, when he realized George and Linda had a preplanned arrangement, bowed out, saving Linda the awkwardness of choosing between two airport guides.

“This potentially rather confusing situation was very amicably resolved,” says Linda. “George would escort me into New York.”

So Linda and George bid farewell to Jean-Claude. George took Linda’s bag. And they set off into Manhattan together.

An introduction to New York City

Like Linda, George Porter was also a New York City transplant. He grew up in a small town in Arkansas and moved northeast to work as an architect.

New York in the early 1970s was an “exciting place” and there were “a lot of new things happening” to 27-year-old George.

But even as he revelled in the city and all it had to offer, George felt New York would be more fun “to share with somebody.”

“I just hadn’t found exactly the right person to do that with,” George tells CNN Travel today.

An old friend from high school in Arkansas connected George with Linda – this friend was dating someone in Linda’s extended circle in Paris. She wrote to George, and asked if he’d meet Linda at the airport on Sept. 3, 1971. In her note, the friend told George a little about Linda – describing her intellect, her ambition, her sense of adventure.

“Linda seems like the sort of person that I might end up liking quite a lot, because I really like intelligent women,” says George.

“It seemed like a fun thing to do,” recalls George, who adds he was also “fascinated with the idea of someone from England, from Europe.”

At JFK, he looked out for young blonde women who might be Linda, ruling them out when they weren’t in the requisite pink and white top. Then he noticed Jean-Claude, the Air France employee, also approaching women and also asking if they were Linda Ford.

“So then we realized that we were both waiting for the same person,” says George.

When George first saw Linda walk through the crowds towards him, he was struck by her right away, thinking she was “rather good-looking.”

Linda, for her part, thought George “seemed very charming.”

And despite the surreality of their airport meeting – and the Jean-Claude of it all – Linda and George felt an instantaneous comfort around each other. Together, they boarded a bus into the city towards Linda’s temporary accommodation in midtown. It was evening, and Linda was exhausted from travelling, so George left her to rest up – but not before asking if she’d like him to give her a New York City introduction the following day.

Linda agreed, so on Sept. 4, 1971, she and George walked the length and breadth of Manhattan together – talking, sightseeing, getting to know each other.

They realized, as Linda puts it, that they had a “similar outlook on life.” They were both “politically and socially aware,” she says, and “there was some sort of natural gravitation.”

George loved seeing the city that had captured his heart through Linda’s eyes. It was clear Linda was quickly becoming enamoured with New York too.

“I remember, in the evening, driving in a taxi to the theatre through New York City, looking at all the skyscrapers lit up,” says Linda. She recalls being “captivated.”

“We both were very much captivated by New York City,” says George. “We absolutely loved it.”

George and Linda were also captivated by one another. The days rolled into each other, and they continued to spend every moment they could together. George took Linda on the Staten Island Ferry – not to visit Staten Island, but rather to admire the spectacular views of the city’s skyline from the water.

“It’s just a wonderful way to get a feel for the island of Manhattan,” says Linda. “Then, later on, probably not that first weekend, but not long after I’d been there, we took a boat trip that you can do that goes all around the island, and takes you past the Statue of Liberty.”

Linda and George’s romantic connection, “just happened,” says Linda. “And quite quickly, I have to say, as well.”

About a week or so after Linda’s arrival in JFK, Linda and George shared their first kiss in George’s apartment one evening.

“I think if you share interests, and you have a fairly outgoing personality, which we both do, then things just naturally grow from it,” says Linda.

“And I mean, George was very good-looking – he still is. But he was. My friends at home were dead impressed, as you can imagine.”

George and Linda fell in love against the backdrop of a buzzy, 1970s New York. They wandered the city’s museums, went to the theatre, relaxed in Central Park, and walked the streets hand in hand.

The first month Linda was there it was hot and humid, but October was “beautiful.” As the leaves on the Central Park trees turned bronze and gold, Linda and George grew closer.

Meanwhile, Linda settled into her university job – the commute was long, but the work was interesting and rewarding. She found an apartment on Third Avenue in Manhattan, sharing with two new friends, Penny and Patty.

Meanwhile George lived downtown, in an apartment he calls “not the world’s best” – home not only to himself, but plenty of cockroaches and an old waterbed left by the previous hippie tenant.

New York wasn’t the counterculture epicentre it had been 10 years before – “now all the hippies were on the West Coast,” says George.

“But New York actually, in some ways, was a bit more authentic, just a place where a lot of things were happening,” says George. “It was a very, very exciting place at the time.”

Committing to each other

About six weeks after Linda’s arrival in New York, Linda’s father came to the city on business. Linda was pleased to have an opportunity to introduce him to George.

“I said that George had been taking me around and we were enjoying each other’s company,” she recalls. “It was nice for them to meet quite early on in our relationship.”

Then, when Christmas rolled around, George invited Linda to spend the holidays with him and meet his family.

Linda was just about getting accustomed to New York City by then. The small town in Arkansas was another culture shock, but to Linda, it was fascinating, with its “very beautiful scenery, mountains and pine woods, and all that and lakes.”

George’s parents welcomed Linda happily – they were excited to see their son so content, and were fascinated by Linda’s tales of life in the U.K. George’s mother proudly told her friends the young couple were “engaged to be engaged.”

George and Linda batted those comments away, but it was true they saw a future with one another. Accordingly, in spring 1972, they moved in together. They loved waking up each day in the same small apartment, and spending long evenings out and about in the city.

But there was a time limit on this happiness – Linda’s work visa only permitted her to stay in the U.S. for a year. Her period in New York had a definitive endpoint.

That’s how the conversation about marriage first started. There was no big romantic proposal, but to George and Linda, the moment still felt romantic simply because the decision to commit was so obvious to them both.

“When you meet someone that you have very similar interests and outlook to, it does occur to you that maybe it would be sensible to spend the rest of your life with them,” says Linda.

Linda and George flew back to the U.K. to get married in summer 1972. Their wedding took place in Sevenoaks in Kent, England, where Linda’s parents lived. It was a small celebration. Linda’s wedding dress was inspired by a design she’d seen in a magazine in New York, made by someone locally in the U.K.

Linda says the wedding day felt like “the fulfilment of a year of having gotten closer to each other.”

“I was as excited as could be,” says George, but he adds that he thought of the wedding day as more of a “public commitment.”

“I think we’d made private commitments to each other before that,” he says.

“Yes, we had,” agrees Linda.

Newly married, Linda – who took George’s name, becoming Linda Porter – returned to the U.S., once again landing in JFK airport. It was less than a year since she’d first met George in the busy arrivals hall. Now they were walking through the airport together, starting a new chapter.

Linda and George moved into a new apartment in Manhattan, on West End Avenue between Riverside Park and Broadway. They threw lively parties, inviting friends around into the early hours of the morning. They still loved New York. They went out to the theatre, watched concerts and whiled away afternoons in art galleries.

Relocating across the Atlantic

Then, in 1975, Linda and George welcomed their daughter, who spent her early years as a New Yorker, until in 1979, the family moved to the U.K.

This decision was influenced by a number of factors. For one, Linda felt her academic career had stalled, she was still part-time and wasn’t sure where she’d go from there. Meanwhile the city of New York was broke, as George recalls it, so architecture jobs were suddenly few and far between. Plus, George and Linda weren’t sure about bringing up their daughter in the city – but also didn’t fancy relocating to the suburbs of New Jersey.

“Why don’t we try living in the U.K.?” suggested George one day. And so in 1979 they packed up their life, shipping their most treasured belongings across the Atlantic and relocated to Linda’s parents’ hometown of Sevenoaks, where they’d got married.

George was excited to experience life in the U.K. – and his mother, rather than balking at her son relocating across the Atlantic, was delighted.

“She absolutely hated New York City,” says George. “But she was quite enchanted with the southern part of England.”

Upon moving back to the U.K., Linda left academia behind, and worked a corporate job for 22 years.

But later, when her daughter was grown up, Linda returned to her first love – research and writing. She’s since written five history books – focused on British Tudor History – with her sixth set to publish in June 2024.

Five decades of love and support

George and Linda, now in their late 70s, still live happily in Sevenoaks in the U.K.

Meanwhile their now adult daughter is married with two teenage girls and living in Switzerland. Linda and George are proud of their international family.

“If your parents have come from different countries, it’s not so alarming to you, necessarily, to move somewhere else,” says Linda.

The family reunites when they can – sometimes in the U.K., sometimes in Switzerland, and occasionally on vacation elsewhere in the world. It’s been some years since Linda and George made it to the U.S., but a few years ago, Linda and George’s daughter took her children to New York, and they retraced the footsteps of their grandparents' first meeting.

This year, Linda and George will celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary.

“People often assume there is some sort of secret to it,” says Linda of their decades of happiness.

“I think in our case, it’s a combination of having similar interests, but also rather different backgrounds, which can produce a positive kind of tension, if you like.”

Linda adds that marriage is “a journey.”

“And like all journeys, sometimes it has twists and turns, but the end is always that you are together,” says Linda.

“I’m very grateful for that,” agrees George, who adds that long marriages encompass many different phases.

“I’m nearly 80 years old, I’m not like I was when Linda first saw me,” he says, although he still has the moustache.

“There have been a great long number of transitions – I would tend to say our marriage has never been the same from one year to another. It’s constantly evolved.”

But throughout the years, across the phases and transitions, a stalwart of Linda and George’s marriage has been the “support” they provide for one another, as George puts it.

Looking back on their airport rendezvous five decades later, and the series of serendipitous events that led to their meeting, Linda reflects that she’s not a great believer in coincidences. She and George both feel “life is what you make of it” and are big proponents of the importance of “following your instincts” and committing to making something work when it feels right.

Still, the couple still chuckle when they recall Linda stepping onto U.S. soil for the first time only to find two men waiting for her in JFK arrivals.

“Jean-Claude was very pleasant,” says George, laughing. “But I was the one who ended up with her.”