By Victor Greto
When Verne Vitrofsky introduced John Hayhurst to her parents she just couldn’t tell them his real name.
“I didn’t know how my mom would feel,” she says. “So I introduced him as John Hayowitz.”
Never mind that at the time Verne was in her early forties and had been on her own for decades.
She’s a Bronx girl, with a thick accent and attitude to match, and it was just plain weird for her to be bringing home a man nearly a decade younger than she, who grew up in Oklahoma and identified himself as a Cherokee Indian.
“I wasn’t even sure where Oklahoma was when I met him,” Verne, 51, says.
It’s more than 1,200 miles southwest of the Bronx. Who knew?
“People from the Bronx try to act hardcore because they’re so vulnerable,” John, 42, says in a slight Oklahoma drawl.
Verne is, well, not laid back. She seems to have been in a hurry all her life.
Born and raised a Sephardic Jew in the Grand Concourse section of the Bronx, she graduated from Hunter College at 19 with a degree in teaching. She spent the next 20 years in teaching and administration there, then became an administrator in the Bergen County school system in New Jersey.
She met John at a Hilton hotel in February 1994. She was having a glass of wine at the hotel bar, and sat down next to him. But she couldn’t understand what he was saying.
“I had a hard time understanding him because of his accent. I moved a couple of chairs down. Fifteen minutes later he’s sitting next to me again.”
John had grown up on a farm in Oklahoma; at 17, he joined the Army, and was stationed in Germany for a couple of years.
Each of his parents was half Cherokee; his father also was part Dutch, his mother, part German.
But they were Cherokees, John says.
“My parents faced a lot of prejudice being Indian,” he says. “I’m pretty generic looking, kind of a chameleon. Indians pick up that attitude. If you assimilate and accept that others have prejudices and use them when dealing with people, you can fit into their world. You put yourself in that little slot and not worry about conflicts.”
So, the budding relationship between the Oklahoma-Cherokee and the Bronx-Jewish woman was not a source of conflict, but an opportunity.
Since the day they met, Verne and John have been investigating one another’s cultures.
Their home in Hollywood Lakes has a mezuza out front, and American Indian artifacts within.
“There are a lot of parallels between Jews and Indians,” John says. “Everybody being against you all the time. The interaction we have is stronger because we do feel a kindredship.”
Verne says that it’s “both the different things and the same that bring us together.”