This Valentine’s Day, we remember the love between Gen. George C. Marshall and his second wife, Katherine Tupper Brown. They first met in the summer of 1929. Both were widowers who never intended to remarry.
Marshall, a colonel at Fort Benning, Georgia, accepted an invitation to a dinner nearby Columbus. Brown came to the dinner reluctantly from Baltimore, Maryland, with her seventeen-year-old daughter Molly. Marshall was standing by the fireplace when Brown entered the house. “My first impression,” she later recalled, “was of a tall, slender man with sandy hair and deep-set eyes.” He immediately impressed her by refusing a cocktail. They spent the entire dinner bantering back and forth as Brown found herself attracted to the officer and his “way of looking right through you.