PRAY FOR THE DEAD, FIGHT LIKE HELL FOR THE LIVING
THEY MET ON A BOAT. A huge, liveaboard trimaran in the British Virgin Islands, to be exact. She was there as a magazine writer, reporting a story about a cycling and diving vacation. He was a diving instructor. “The very things that attracted me to Bill for a shipboard romance,” she remembers, “were what seemed to make him unsuitable as a permanent mate. China-blue eyes, sun-blond hair, an allover tan, and a nomadic lifestyle?”
She was going on 50 and divorced. He was in his 30s and had “run away from home” in Akron, Ohio, as he put it, escaping an office job and a predictable trajectory.
Yes, echoes of a pulp romance, or maybe a Sandra Bullock vehicle. But it turned out to be more than a vacation fling. For nearly a year, Judy Wade and Bill Baker exchanged letters and
