It all started out with a gag.
Mickey Flacks — then Miriam Sally Hartman — was a 17-year-old camp counselor at a communist Jewish summer camp in New York. The year was 1957, at the height of the Red Scare. Dick Flacks — also a camp counselor — was then 19. They first met in the camp office when a mutual friend was explaining how she had caught a case of “vernal catarrh,” now better known as conjunctivitis. Mickey thought this name was hilarious and began riffing on it to the tune of “Johnny Guitar,” then a top pop hit.
If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was the next best thing. “We knew we were meant for each other,” Dick Flacks recalled.