Valentine's Tales: Janet and Joe Koritnik

We met on a blind date in Cody back in 1983. I was home from the University of Wyoming for the summer, and Joe just happened to be in town helping coach a 13-year-old all-star baseball team from Cheyenne. A friend of Joe’s, who he hadn’t seen in years, was living in Cody and drove a unique Corvette. He drove past Joe with a carload of boys and followed him. Once they stopped, they started talking and decided to go out the following night. The friend with the Corvette was dating a friend of mine, so we were “set up,” sight unseen that night.

After hitting it off I, my girlfriend and the Corvette friend went down to Cheyenne for Frontier Days a few weeks later. It was an interesting trip in a two-seat Corvette, especially on the way home with the girlfriend and car owner not speaking to each other the entire trip.

Joe and a friend made a return trip to Cody in August to spend more time with me, and then when I went back to school in Laramie that September, we continued dating.

It wasn’t long after that, on my birthday in February of 1984, we became engaged when Joe asked me to marry him. We were married in August of 1984 and are still going strong over 40 years later. We have two children, Matt, who lives in Powell with his wife Kelsi and two sons Benson and Hayes, and Karen, who lives in Cody with her husband Chris and two children Hadley and Maddox.