At his school, girlfriends weren't allowed in dorm rooms with the door closed. Curfews were imposed every night. Students wore uniforms but couldn't kiss or hold hands while wearing them.
At her school, students did pretty much as they pleased. Sleepovers, parties, public displays of affection. The most pressing wardrobe question, most mornings, was whether to wear shoes.
Naval Academy graduate David Buck's fiancee, Rachel Hall, a St. John's College student, started joint seminars to bring the campuses together.
(Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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But Michael Moore and Laura Mangum endured the stares and the gossip and the long nights apart, he at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, she a short walk across downtown at St. John's College. They dated, midshipman and Johnnie, all through school. A week after graduation, when he was finally allowed, they wed.
It's hard to imagine two settings more dissimilar than St. John's and the Naval Academy. One is the Great Books school, all about egalitarianism and free expression, Baudelaire and Birkenstocks. The other is a place of structure and discipline, spit and polish.
But now and again, love blooms across College Avenue.
"She was the Johnnie who was dating that guy in uniform," said Moore, now in Milton, Fla., awaiting flight school. "I didn't have to deal with it so much because I was locked up so much."
St. John's traces its origins to 1696, the Naval Academy to 1845. St. John's once owned the land on which the academy sits.
Midshipmen must be out of bed by 6:30 each morning. Students march to their meal. Lights out is 11 p.m. for freshmen, or plebes. Demerits are handed out for rooms or uniforms not properly "squared away."
Johnnies study with professors who are called "tutors," because everyone in the classroom is considered an equal. There are few tests, no final exams and students are encouraged to ignore their grades. The campus hosts Viennese waltzes. The annual beer bash after senior essays are finished usually leads to some measure of nudity, students say.
St. John's students read original texts, in chronological order, from the dawn of Western intellectual thought, including Plato. Most students come away with an image of Annapolis as the philosopher's utopian Republic, of themselves as the reflective philosopher kings, and of the Mids as the soldierly guardians.
At first, Mary Corrigan, 24, a 2004 St. John's graduate, thought the cadets were "kind of cocky and arrogant," she said.
A friend set her up with Devin Corrigan, 23, a midshipman a year ahead of her in school. Their first date was the Black Ball, a Halloween costume party, at St. John's. It did not go well.
"I'd ask him about his car, and he'd give me a one-word response," Mary Corrigan said. "I'd ask him about the academy, and he'd give me a one-word response. Once everyone figured out he was a Middy, people started looking at him, and he started looking back."
Devin had his own questions about Mary: Was she going to have a wardrobe built around tie-dyed shirts? Did she bathe regularly and shave her legs more than once a year?
