www.montereycountynow.com FEBRUARY 13-19, 2025 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Love in their Pacific Grove living room one evening after work, hanging out with their dog Zoey and new puppy, Bunny. “Ew, you freak!” Love teases playfully. Whatever attracted Bellone to Love’s ad, it worked. Back then the paper’s personal ads used a system of free ads, each with its own numbered voice mailbox. If someone wanted to contact the poster, they dialed a 900 phone number and were charged $1.99 per minute to leave a message. Bellone called the number and left Love a message. “I had been single for a year and I was tired of being single. I wanted to be in a relationship,” he says. He didn’t drink, so bars weren’t really his scene— ”I’m not much for social things,” he says—and he had already placed his own ad in the Weekly. “What the heck, I’ll take a swing at it,” he remembers thinking. Bellone actually left two messages for Love. The first let her know that he was financially secure and he owned his own business and his own home. He called back a second time because he forgot to tell her that he loved to dance—and that he was good. (“And he was,” Love says.) She liked his messages, although instead of hearing “Dan Bellone” on the message she thought he said “Sam Malone,” the fictional bartender on Cheers. “And I thought, ‘Winner, whoever this guy is.’” The part about being a good dancer also helped seal the deal for her. She called him and they set a date for noon on July 15 at Caledonia Park in her hometown of Pacific Grove. “I didn’t want to be on time and seem anxious, so I waited until 12:03,” Love says. “I had both of my kids with me. My son was 8 and my daughter was 4 and I had one on each hip—I said, ‘You guys, stay by my hips, the hip rule applies.’” There was Bellone, 6-foot-5 with blue eyes, wearing cowboy boots and bearing a gift of a bag of plums from his yard in Salinas. “I took one look at him and said, ‘You guys can go play. It’s fine,’” Love remembers telling the kids. “I liked him immediately. I just felt safe and nice.” Bellone similarly remembers, “When I saw her I said, ‘Wow.’ I felt some chemistry, and I was quite pleased.” After hitting it off that day, Love invited Bellone to join her and her son and grandmother at the movies that night. They saw Wild, Wild West. Her grandmother loved him. Her kids had liked him from the meeting at the park, especially her son. “The next day he took me to a lake on his crappy little boat. The rest is history. We’ve been together ever since,” she says. They married in 2001, but it’s not entirely accurate to say they’ve been together for 26 years since they met in Caledonia Park. Their love story comes with a twist. In the early days, personal ads in newspapers were mostly men looking for young women to marry. The classified ads proved profitable enough that one British entrepreneur created the Matrimonial News in 1870, selling 40-word ads for sixpence. He opened two offices in San Francisco and Kansas City, Missouri the following year. Those cities were strategic—lonely settlers were looking for wives to join them as they settled the West. The paper ran for three decades. Back in 1990 when the Monterey County Weekly was still known as the Coast Weekly, the paper merged with its sister paper, a classified publication called The Exchange. On May 3, 1990, the first personal ads appeared in the Weekly. At the time there was a subsection of personals called “Relationships.” Relationship ads were required to run for two weeks, $10 for up to 20 words per week, 50 cents per each additional word. A box number was assigned to each ad, and if someone wanted to respond, they had to send a written response to the paper. If the one placing the ad wanted to have those responses forwarded to them, they had to provide a self-addressed stamped envelope. The responses were held for only 30 days. Eventually the paper linked up with a company called TPI, which provided a phone-based personal ad service to dozens of alternative newspapers around the country in the 1990s and 2000s. Placing an ad was free, up to 30 words, but responding to an ad via a 900 number was charged by the minute. “‘Women Seeking Men’ was the moneymaker for us,” says Kevin Smith, now the Weekly’s director of digital media who back then managed the classified ads. Women called men less often than men called women. “If [the men] got a half dozen calls they were doing well,” Smith says. To boost ad sales, the classifieds staff hosted “romance parties” in restaurants around the Monterey Peninsula, Smith says. They were mixers where people could come and mingle, and hopefully sign up for an ad. The personal ads section became popular, growing to an entire page of the paper, making it an important revenue stream. “And then the internet started comDan Bellone and Lisa Love (shown with their new Yorkipoo puppy, Bunny) met through a personal ad she placed in the Weekly in 1999. Her ad—which ran with a typo, “funky” instead of “spunky” as intended—is shown below. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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