They had first gotten to know each other at a mutual friend's birthday party in the late winter of 1965, when he spotted the wholesome beauty with light brown hair from across the room. Mitt had just turned 18, Ann was 15 — almost exactly the same ages his parents had been when they met. Ann attended Cranbrook's sister school, called Kingswood, on the other side of campus.

Cranbrook in the 1960s still adhered to a strict separation of the sexes. The girls were allowed to see the boys for athletic events, dance lessons, and a weekly movie night in the gym. Beyond that, their interaction was largely confined to letters, which the Kingswood girls lined up to receive daily. Mitt gave Ann a ride home from the birthday party, and that led to a first date going to see "The Sound of Music."

Now, she wanted to know about Mormonism. So he turned to the "Articles of Faith," the 13 tenets church founder Joseph Smith had once used to explain his religion to a Chicago reporter.

Mitt looked Ann in the eyes and began with the first article. "We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost." When he finished, he noticed that Ann had started to cry.

What Mitt didn't know was that Ann had been brought up in a home with a father who had absolutely no use for religion and she had been on a spiritual search since a young age. Her father had grown up in a coal-mining family in Wales, and Ann's brothers say he associated the religion of his childhood — a Welsh Congregational church he found as dreary as the climate of Wales — with drudgery and hogwash. Before their dad married their mom, he insisted she give up organized religion. "Dad," says Ann's older brother, Roderick Davies, "considered people who were religious to be weak in the knees."

But like Mitt, Ann had a special relationship with her father. So he occasionally indulged his only daughter's requests that the family attend services at one Protestant church or another. He remained unswayed by the pulpit and believed his daughter would eventually come to her senses. As for her romance, Ann's father knew Mitt was heading to California for college while Ann still had two years left of high school. So how serious could they be?

Storm shelter

In the fall of 1965, Mitt Romney left behind Cranbrook, with its varsity sweaters and hand-delivered courtship letters, and moved across the country to San Francisco's Bay area, which was fast becoming the capital of the counterculture movement. By the time he settled into his freshman dorm at Stanford University, the nearby campus of the University of California-Berkeley had been fully radicalized by the antiauthority Free Speech Movement. In San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury was emerging as an LSD-fueled mecca for free-loving hippies in peasant skirts and dashikis.