DJ stops music to mourn wife
It was 3 a.m. one day last week and Nate Giles was back on the air at WPFW-FM. He’d taken off several weeks to care for his wife, Rosemary, who had been ill. She would die May 23 at their home in D.C.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to salute my bride,” said Giles, 72, who hosts the station’s “Into the Dawn” jazz and R&B show that airs on Wednesdays from 2 to 5 a.m. Giles was still working through grief when he returned to work, kicking off the first hour with 14 old-school love songs played back-to-back.
He’d later tell me that being alone in the studio, with no phones ringing and unsure if anyone was even listening, led him to pause the music and tell a most remarkable love story.
It began in 1964. Giles was 15, living on Capitol Hill and attending Browne Junior High School. His ninth-grade homeroom teacher was a soon-to-be famous singer named Roberta Flack. Before the school year ended, however, his family moved to Georgetown and a none-too-pleased Giles had to transfer to Francis Junior High.
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The disappointment was short-lived.
“I’d been there about a week, and I see this young lady and I say, ‘Oh, man,’” Giles recalled. She was an eighth-grader named Rosemary Johnson. “Then a guy comes up to me and says, ‘I don’t know what you’re looking at over there; she’s somebody else’s girl.’”
Giles graduated from Francis Junior High without ever saying a word to the girl who had caught his eye. He went on to attend Western High School, which was later renamed the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. A year later, Rosemary began attending the same high school. But Giles still hadn’t figured out how to approach her.
Two years after graduating from high school, he was drafted into the Marines and prepared to ship off to fight in Vietnam. But his orders were changed at the last minute and he was assigned to work on computers at the Navy annex in Arlington instead.
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Giles recalled walking along a hallway at the annex, just before being discharged from the Marines two years later, when he saw a familiar face headed in his direction. It was Rosemary Johnson. She’d been working on the clerical staff at the annex during the same time he had been working the computers.
“We made some small talk,” Giles recalled. But he was more concerned with getting his discharge papers.
A few weeks later, he was driving along Columbia Pike in a brand-new 1972 Chevy Monte Carlo when he saw her again, waiting at a bus stop. “I said to myself, ‘Whoa, there’s something going on with this girl,’” Giles recalled.
He pulled over and offered to give her a ride home. They exchanged telephone numbers when he dropped her off.
Not long afterward, Giles said, she called him. He told her he was going to the Carter Barron Amphitheatre to see Smokey Robinson give his last performance with the Miracles before going solo. She wanted to go with him, but he couldn’t take her. He had a girlfriend, he said.
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“She said, okay,” Giles recalled. “But there was something about the way she said it that stuck in my head.” At the concert, all he could think about was Rosemary. He and his girlfriend eventually parted ways. And he and Rosemary started hanging out.
“I wasn’t doing anything fresh,” he told me. “We’d grab some food, drive to Hains Point, park, watch airplanes take off and land, and talk.”
In 1973, they went to a justice of the peace and got married.
As he told the story to listeners — me included — certain songs from the 1960s began to come to mind. “My Girl,” by the Temptations. “I Was Made to Love Her,” by Stevie Wonder. “When A Man Loves A Woman,” by Percy Sledge. They were part of the soundtrack for the budding love lives of baby boomers.
It was clear as Giles talked about his wife that they had something special. Their love deepened, becoming seasoned by the birth of children and grandchildren.
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In 1995, the couple returned from a Caribbean cruise and Rosemary told him about the lump that doctors had found in one of her breasts. Together, they beat the cancerous threat and, in Giles’s view, became closer.
The effects of the chemotherapy had caused other problems, though. She needed surgery to repair torn tissue in her brain. But they got through that ordeal.
Then came a stroke, followed by the onset of dementia and Parkinson’s disease. In April 2020, both caught covid-19.
“I thought we were both going to die,” Giles said. But they recovered, even as the other diseases continued to take a toll.
She was trying to eat some food last month, had difficulty swallowing and began to choke. Giles used CPR and the Heimlich maneuver to keep her breathing until paramedics arrived.
After a few days in the hospital, doctors released her — but with a prognosis that sent Giles rushing to his car in tears.
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“They said she had two weeks to live,” he told me. “I said, ‘No, we beat everything else. We can beat this too.’”
Her only request was that he not put her in a nursing home. So he turned their living room into a hospice and got to be with her for 11 more days.
Telling the story took a little more than 10 minutes — then the phones in the studio began to light up. Double, triple, quadruple the calls he usually gets at that hour. Friends from childhood were calling in condolences and offering support, along with night owl fans he never knew he had during his 18 years with WPFW.
He resumed the music, beginning with the Temptations, “I Wish It Would Rain.”
Listen, I got to cry ’cause crying eases the pain.
People, this hurt I feel inside words they could never explain.
The song reflected the sadness he felt. But no song could come close to capturing the magnitude of more than 50 years of love.
To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.
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