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Guy Smith had frequently dated white girls in high school, but, say his parents, he had never been serious about any of them. Then, in Rock Creek Park, he met Peggy and began riding with her, she on a rented horse at first. Then she began riding Navajo as much as he, and won jumping prizes on Guy's horse.
His love for the pinto in part determined his decision to attend Washington's Georgetown University, just a ten-minute walk from the park stables. As a freshman, he expatiated on an assigned English essay subject: "Status Symbols." "Success is the true status symbol," he wrote. To Guy, Navajo was the highest symbol, and he owned it.
Guy did well at Georgetown, though not brilliantly, earning A's in his history major, B's and C's in most of his other subjects. One summer, when he was not cantering through the park with Peggy and Navajo, he worked as a counselor in a Southwest Washington playground, supervising Negro children. "And that's the kind of thing," says Principal Orr, "that Guy wants to do when he gets out of the service—something that involves him with people."
In fact, he may decide to make military service—the most integrated segment of American society—his career. Guy won an ROTC commission at Georgetown, ranking among the top six officers in the cadet corps, and is now waiting to enter Army helicopter school, for which he volunteered. He will probably go to Viet Nam after completing the course, and will do at least a five-year hitch in the service. In the interim, he is working as a data processor at NASA's Ames Research Center near Stanford, where Peggy is now a sophomore.
She has been a hyperactive student. Besides having a variety of part-time jobs, including baby-sitting and house cleaning, she works on the Stanford Daily and helps run the university's International Center. Peggy has had to sit through interminable and often emotional discussions of Viet Nam and hear her father's policies attacked. She is as cool an opponent in these sessions as she is at bridge, which she plays with skill and determination. Guy moved to California, after graduating from Georgetown last June, to be near Peggy, who was taking summer courses at the university. They have already shipped their aging, somewhat flabby pinto Cupid to the Coast.
Telling, Not Asking. Peggy impresses her teachers and fellow students as eminently levelheaded, fazed neither by her father's rank nor by the social hazards of having had a steady Negro beau. At Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest Washington, she edited the yearbook and made the honors category every year. By last fall, when she was ready to enter Stanford, she and Guy were informally engaged. She wore no engagement ring, but brought Guy around the State Department's seventh floor so that her father's secretaries could meet the fellow she had talked about so often. Guy never formally asked the Rusks for her hand. When Peggy and Guy decided last winter to marry, they simply told their parents about it. Said a Stanford classmate: "She was very mature about it. She knew that bigotry was something they would have to face, but something she was willing to endure."