We Meet in the Middle

Like the best storybook romances, Leigh and Clay Hartman started out as opposites on, well, everything before falling into one another’s arms.

The love story of Leigh and Clay Hartman is a most surprising tale of the unlikely union of people from opposing worlds, a narrative of a connection formed between individuals as disparate as a fearless sky diver and a meticulous chess player.

Clay Hartman spent his youth in rural Sterling, Colorado – a place where the residents are occupied in farming and ranching. His parents owned a momand-pop motel, and he grew up cleaning rooms, and taking out the trash. At 17 he joined the navy, “to get out of that little town.” He won entry into the ROTC program at Cornell University, graduated with a degree in civil engineering and became a combat pilot.

Leigh Hartman was raised in the upscale community of Hilton Head, South Carolina, where high end resorts attract affluent visitors. Her father, a medical technologist, ran the clinical lab at the hospital where her mother also worked. After high school, Leigh stayed close to home and family, graduating from Stetson University in Central Florida with a degree in business economics.

In June 1995 Clay was stationed on Whidbey Island Naval Base, Washington, training for combat bombing and in the process of unraveling a marriage. He was “absolutely not looking for romance.” He described himself, as a “hair on fire, knuckle dragging naval aviator.”

At the same time, Leigh was living in Charleston, working for Arthur D. Little as a project management consultant for the US Navy. She thought of herself then as now, as a safety-first kind of girl. “Left to my own devices, I would be a wallflower.”

Thinking that it would be funny to witness what would surely be akin to two shooting stars colliding, one of Leigh’s co-workers (married to a friend of Clay’s) had suggested bringing them together for dinner.

Yet fate has a funny way of defying logic. Instead of friction there was magnetism. “We just clicked,” Clay said. “She’s a sweet, sophisticated, Southern belle with a beautiful smile. What guy can’t be happy about that?”

Though Leigh observed that “Clay was not lacking in confidence,” she also remembers laughing a lot that first night, and that he could dance like John Travolta. “Our friends thought we would agree on nothing; but the way it turned out, I calmed him down and he livened me up.”

They talked for three hours on their second date the next night at the Pineapple Fountain in Charleston’s Waterfront Park. The relationship gained momentum, and they made plans for Leigh to visit Clay in Washington in August.

It was grand tour of the Northwest, hiking, winery visits, a high-speed ferry ride to Victoria, British Columbia, a seaplane to Roche Harbor, and dancing at a Naval gala event.

After the whirlwind escapade, Leigh went back to Charleston. On Thanksgiving, she returned to Whidbey Island one last time before Clay deployed on a combat cruise. For six months, Leigh wrote, sent care packages, and cassette tapes. In Thailand, Clay bought Leigh silk and sapphires. He hoped the stones would one day become part of her engagement ring.

When the tour ended in June 1996, she met him on fly-in. They spent a week together, by the end of which Clay remembers, “the relationship train was pulled out and I told her ‘I love you.’”

In July, Clay flew to Charleston and met Leigh’s family and her boss. Knowing that he might lose her to the Navy, Leigh’s boss offered her a full-time travel position. She was now able to see Clay every weekend.

Clay was transferred to Kingsville, Texas, as a flight instructor in 1997, and Leigh moved her belongings into his house. In Charleston, he found a jeweler who could make the ring he designed with the Thai sapphires and a diamond he had selected.

On May 24,1997, Clay proposed at the Pineapple Fountain.

They were married on May 1, 1999, in Charleston at the Old St Andrews Episcopal Church. In 2003 Clay was transferred to Norfolk and their son Luke was born in October 2004.

Clay retired from the Navy in 2005. Leigh retired from Bank of America in 2015 and the family moved to Highlands. She said that “My husband and son wanted to live in a small town. They didn’t love living in a big city and Highlands was the one place we could all agree on.”

The following year, in 2019, the 20th anniversary of their marriage, they purchased Calders on Main Street.

Clay confirms that “We really are opposites. She’s an introvert, and I have for years lived on adrenaline. Her family is the quiets, and mine is the louds.”

-As Leigh says, “I straighten out his curves. Without him, I would be boring. Without me, he would be chaos. We meet in the middle.”

by Marlene Osteen