Students often remember Beaty Towers for the luxury of on-suite bathrooms and kitchenettes, but for Ramon and Margaret Raposo, they remember the apartments as the place where their love story began.
Margaret, an English major, and Ramon (BDESF in Design ‘74) moved into Beaty Towers in the fall of 1972.
“Daily, I would walk by the different students in the commons area and say hello to all those I had already met by name,” Margaret said. “The ‘Hi, how are you?’ was for those whose names I did not know. Ray has pointed out to me that he was a ‘Hi, how are you?’ for a few weeks”.
“I arrived fashionably late to a Beaty Towers dance on the night of Oct. 14, a Saturday,” Margaret remembered.
After taking a break, the band started to play again and Ramon asked Margaret to dance.
“We started dancing and he did this dance I wasn’t familiar with. It was called the Penguin, something he had learned in Miami, and seemed quite hip,” she said.
After the dance, the two took a stroll down Museum Road to the Florida State Museum.
“We ended up talking all night, learning all about each other,” Ramon said.
The next day, Margaret returned to the commons area in hopes of running into Ramon again.
“I pretended to read some Shakespeare in the reading room, all while waiting to see if Ray would show up. He finally did and we talked some more,” she said.
Margaret asked Ramon to watch The Poseidon Adventure with her. Ramon happily said yes.
“We continued to date and soon became a couple,” Ramon said. “We dated during our junior and senior years all while living at Beaty Towers, and although it was never easy, our love for each other never wavered.”
They both graduated in June 1974. Ramon moved to New York for a job opportunity while Margaret returned to Virginia. “By January 1975, tired of being apart, we reunited in Miami, and exactly a year after graduating, we got married” Margaret said.
The Raposos have two adult sons, Ryan and Brad, who are both big Gator fans as well.
“We still love the University of Florida and we go back to Gainesville for Homecoming weekend every year. It’s a yearly revival visit to where our UF love story started forty-five years ago,” Ramon said.
