Fast-forward to a friend's house party several years later, when Mitt Romney, then 18, spied the same girl, Ann Davies.

This time, Mitt offered 15-year-old Ann a ride home, even though they came with different dates. Later he would confess he was smitten by the fetching teen. Their first date was all-American: a screening of "The Sound of Music."

On another outing, Mitt and Ann joined others in using ice blocks to slide down hills at a local golf course at night.

"We did that with a bunch of high school friends and got caught and got put in the paddy wagons," Ann Romney recalled. "He was just fun, fun, fun to be with him in high school."

As their relationship deepened, Ann asked Mitt about his religion. He feared she would be scared off, but he did his best to explain the basic tenets of the faith. Instead of running away, Ann found in the religion something missing in her life.

Romney proposed marriage at the senior prom. In the fall of 1965, he left for Stanford University but put his studies on hold after one year to undertake his missionary trek — a tradition among male members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the proper name for the Mormon church.

Then, in June 1968, Mitt Romney died — briefly.

He was driving the president of the Mormon mission in France, H. Duane Anderson, and four others on a winding road when their Citroen was struck head-on by a Mercedes that had just passed a truck.

Anderson's wife was killed. A police officer took the unconscious 21-year-old driver for dead and wrote "Il est mort" ("He is dead") on Romney's passport.

As word trickled back to Michigan, George Romney appealed to the U.S. ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., for assistance. Shriver tracked down Romney, battered but alive, in a local hospital.

When he resumed his studies, he went to Brigham Young University, the Mormon institution where Ann had enrolled. Students there embrace the church's prohibitions on alcohol, caffeine and premarital sex — one reason Romney said so many married young. The first of their five sons, Taggert, was born on their one-year anniversary.

The 1960s was a period of social and political tumult amid the Vietnam War and political assassinations. In part because of his limited time at Stanford, in part because of his collegiate hiatus for his mission work, in part because he attended button-down BYU, Romney stayed above the fray.

He avoided military service, first because of a student deferment, then because of his missionary work. In 1969, when he was finally eligible for the draft, he drew No. 300 in the lottery. No one with a number above 195 was taken that year.

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