Kathy Megyeri, GSEHD MA ’69, CCAS MA ’82, met her husband, Les Megyeri, CCAS BA ’63, LAW JD ’68, GWSB MBA ’80, when they were both students at GW. The two went on to amass five degrees at GW between them—hear Kathy’s account of how they met, and learn why GW holds a special place in their hearts:
It was the summer of 1963 when I enrolled in Professor Hennigan’s speech class in the basement of Lisner Auditorium—and in walked Laszlo (Les) Megyeri in an all-white summer suit.
Les was a recent Hungarian refugee who dressed up for class before he went to work as a waiter at Chez Odette, a French restaurant in Georgetown, in order to put himself through GW. I was immediately smitten, and fell even more in love when he became my speech class partner; he was trying to get rid of his Hungarian accent and I was practicing to become a speech therapist.
He asked me out and on our first date, we rented a canoe from Fletcher’s Boat House and canoed to the steps below the Lincoln Memorial to hear a band concert. We then celebrated the end of our summer class and the beginnings of a lifelong romance by walking hand in hand to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August—this time to be part of the March on Washington where we heard Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
Les went on to earn a BA, MBA and law degree from GW, while I earned two master’s degrees from the school–one in English education and the other in gerontology. Even though we both failed at our initial endeavors, as he still has his Hungarian accent and I never became a speech therapist, after 50 years, our personal relationship has been so intricately tied to GW that we have made arrangements to leave our estate to the university which has truly become our own family.
–Kathy Megyeri
