It turns out a well-known Christmas song is about a woman from St. Louis.
In Dan Fogelberg's holiday classic "Same Old Lang Syne," the old flame at the grocery store is a woman named Jill Gruelich. She's a retired teacher from the Parkway School District.
She met Dan in High School in Peoria, Illinois in 1965. They dated on and off into college, then parted ways. Like the song says, they just happened to run into each other at a store on Christmas Eve in 1975.
Five years after that Christmas Eve, Gruelich was driving to O'Hare airport, when Dan's voice came piping through the radio in a song she hadn't heard before. Being a very private person, Jill kept that knowledge mostly to herself for many years. But she stayed in touch with Fogelberg's mother — via Christmas cards, in fact — then, Dan passed away from cancer in 2007.
Freelance writer Jim Bafaro, who also used to work at KMOX, landed a rare interview with Gruelich. They met at a restaurant in St. Louis and she showed up with a greeting card. She told him almost everything in the lyrics actually happened.
While it might not make sense to some to keep quiet about a famous song chronicling your personal experience, Jill may have a reason — a Chicago reporter once interviewed her and then wrote a story that Same Old Lang Syne was the worst Christmas song ever. But Bafaro says "bah-humbug" to that — we all get a little sentimental this time of year and it's a relatable story: A chance meeting with someone you once loved.
Dan and Jill once met at the Fox Theater after one of his shows. They laughed at the only inaccurate line in the song — Jill has green eyes, not blue. Otherwise, it all happened one Christmas Eve in 1975.
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