Before dating apps, how one couple found love in the pages of the Weekly.

SUMMER FUN

Cute, funky, SWF, 32, blonde/blue, N/S, N/D, seeks exciting summer fun. Kids a plus. Locals only. You must be honest, intelligent, and financially secure.

LISA LOVE’S PERSONAL AD APPEARED IN WHAT WAS THEN THE COAST WEEKLY ON JUNE 17, 1999, in hopes of finding a connection that had been eluding her for some time. Her quest through the classified ads was part of a very long tradition – the first personal ad reportedly ran in a British publication in 1695.

“I wanted a boyfriend,” Love says. “So I did a thing, I went crazy and put an ad in the Coast Weekly.” (The paper was renamed Monterey County Weekly in 2004.)

Up until that point she read the personal ads for entertainment and to see what sort of “weirdos” would use ads to meet people. But after a year-and-a-half of no luck finding someone, she placed her own ad. (She used acronyms in her ad popular at the time: “SWF,” single white female; “N/S” and “N/D,” non-smoking and no drugs.)

She remembers with a laugh how the ad was supposed to read: “Cute, spunky SWF… ” When the ad appeared it said “funky.”

“Now it sounds like I don’t shave my armpits,” Love remembers thinking.

“Maybe that was what the attraction was,” says her husband Dan Bellone, sitting in an easy chair across from Love in their Pacific Grove living room one evening after work, hanging out with their dog Zoey and new puppy, Bunny.

“Ew, you freak!” Love teases playfully.

Whatever attracted Bellone to Love’s ad, it worked. Back then the paper’s personal ads used a system of free ads, each with its own numbered voice mailbox. If someone wanted to contact the poster, they dialed a 900 phone number and were charged $1.99 per minute to leave a message.

Bellone called the number and left Love a message.

“I had been single for a year and I was tired of being single. I wanted to be in a relationship,” he says. He didn’t drink, so bars weren’t really his scene – ”I’m not much for social things,” he says – and he had already placed his own ad in the Weekly. “What the heck, I’ll take a swing at it,” he remembers thinking.

Bellone actually left two messages for Love. The first let her know that he was financially secure and he owned his own business and his own home. He called back a second time because he forgot to tell her that he loved to dance – and that he was good. (“And he was,” Love says.)

She liked his messages, although instead of hearing “Dan Bellone” on the message she thought he said “Sam Malone,” the fictional bartender on Cheers. “And I thought, ‘Winner, whoever this guy is.’” The part about being a good dancer also helped seal the deal for her. She called him and they set a date for noon on July 15 at Caledonia Park in her hometown of Pacific Grove.

“I didn’t want to be on time and seem anxious, so I waited until 12:03,” Love says. “I had both of my kids with me. My son was 8 and my daughter was 4 and I had one on each hip – I said, ‘You guys, stay by my hips, the hip rule applies.’”

There was Bellone, 6-foot-5 with blue eyes, wearing cowboy boots and bearing a gift of a bag of plums from his yard in Salinas.

“I took one look at him and said, ‘You guys can go play. It’s fine,’” Love remembers telling the kids. “I liked him immediately. I just felt safe and nice.”

Bellone similarly remembers, “When I saw her I said, ‘Wow.’ I felt some chemistry, and I was quite pleased.”

After hitting it off that day, Love invited Bellone to join her and her son and grandmother at the movies that night. They saw Wild, Wild West. Her grandmother loved him. Her kids had liked him from the meeting at the park, especially her son.

“The next day he took me to a lake on his crappy little boat. The rest is history. We’ve been together ever since,” she says.

They married in 2001, but it’s not entirely accurate to say they’ve been together for 26 years since they met in Caledonia Park. Their love story comes with a twist.

IN THE EARLY DAYS, personal ads in newspapers were mostly men looking for young women to marry. The classified ads proved profitable enough that one British entrepreneur created the Matrimonial News in 1870, selling 40-word ads for sixpence. He opened two offices in San Francisco and Kansas City, Missouri the following year. Those cities were strategic – lonely settlers were looking for wives to join them as they settled the West. The paper ran for three decades.

Back in 1990 when the Monterey County Weekly was still known as the Coast Weekly, the paper merged with its sister paper, a classified publication called The Exchange. On May 3, 1990, the first personal ads appeared in the Weekly. At the time there was a subsection of personals called “Relationships.”

Relationship ads were required to run for two weeks, $10 for up to 20 words per week, 50 cents per each additional word. A box number was assigned to each ad, and if someone wanted to respond, they had to send a written response to the paper. If the one placing the ad wanted to have those responses forwarded to them, they had to provide a self-addressed stamped envelope. The responses were held for only 30 days.

Eventually the paper linked up with a company called TPI, which provided a phone-based personal ad service to dozens of alternative newspapers around the country in the 1990s and 2000s. Placing an ad was free, up to 30 words, but responding to an ad via a 900 number was charged by the minute.

“‘Women Seeking Men’ was the moneymaker for us,” says Kevin Smith, now the Weekly’s director of digital media who back then managed the classified ads. Women called men less often than men called women. “If [the men] got a half dozen calls they were doing well,” Smith says.

To boost ad sales, the classifieds staff hosted “romance parties” in restaurants around the Monterey Peninsula, Smith says. They were mixers where people could come and mingle, and hopefully sign up for an ad.

The personal ads section became popular, growing to an entire page of the paper, making it an important revenue stream.

“And then the internet started coming along,” Smith says.

The first major competitor was Yahoo! Personals. It was a paid internet service that launched in 1997. Craigslist, which was free, also took a bite out of revenues as it grew in popularity after starting in 1995.

TPI partnered with Match.com in 2003 for about a year, to run ads from participating newspapers on the internet, including those from the Weekly. TPI officials ended the “experiment” in 2004, according to a blog post from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia published at the time. (Yahoo! Personals merged with Match.com in 2010 and disappeared.)

As the number of personal ads began to lag, the “I Saw You” section was added to the Weekly’s personals, Smith says. It was similar to Craigslist’s “Missed Connections,” where people could describe chance meetings with wistful hopes of reconnecting.

Also during this time, an alternative newspaper chain, New Times Media, launched backpage.com, a similar classified ad site to Craigslist. Craigslist shut down its personal ads section in 2010 after pressure from critics and attorneys generals who claimed it was supporting prostitution. Backpage resisted removing its personal ads until 2017, when it eliminated them right before a Congressional hearing.

Smith remembers that “the press guys,” the workers at the plant that printed the newspaper, always read the personal ads first, especially “I Saw You,” which made for great entertainment. It was no wonder: Weekly readers’ personal ads were often creative and funny.

Some were quirky, others titillating or a tad risque. Although there were the cliches, including lots of people professing their love for walks on the beach, Smith says.

There are standouts in the Weekly’s archives. One pithy ad from 1990 reads: “WANTED: Good woman who can clean and cook fish, dig worms, sew and who owns a good fishing boat and motor. Please include photo of boat and motor.”

Like so many other corners of society forever changed by the internet, personal ads eventually fell by the wayside – the Weekly discontinued them around 2007.

They may have served as entertainment for some, but they proved a successful way to find a mate for others. Smith says during his time as classifieds manager, he met people who came in to place regular ads who would say, oh by the way, they met their significant other through the Weekly’s personal ads.

LOOKING BACK on their time together, there are a lot of fond memories for Love and Bellone, although there are hard ones too.

“We’ve had a heckuva time,” Love says. “It’s been a lot of ups and downs. We’ve lost a lot of people… we’ve lost a lot of, you know, life, but we’re still together.

“Do you know that we’re not married anymore?”

Love and Bellone divorced after about five years of marriage. A series of bad luck and financial pressures led to the decision. They didn’t see each other for two-and-a-half months. The day they went to court to finalize the divorce, they were both dressed up. They looked at one another with new eyes.

“I called him and said, I really like you and I miss you, and you looked really good,” Love remembers. They moved back in together and since then have definitely been together ever since.

One of their “biggest beefs” in the early years, Love says, is that Bellone was more serious than Love, who is outwardly spunky. Bellone was more the tall, silent type, who didn’t laugh at Love’s jokes. “And I thought I was pretty funny, but he wasn’t laughing. Now he laughs. Now he puts up with me,” she says.

“She makes me laugh when she’s just so goofy,” Bellone says. “I think we needed those parts of each other. She needed my discipline and I needed to loosen up.”

Bellone ponders if it was coincidence that they met through the personals, or if it was meant to be. Love recalls becoming “one of the weirdos” who place personal ads and worrying whether Bellone was a weirdo for answering. Maybe, she thought, they were equally weird.

“And sure enough, we’re both just as weird,” Love says.