Sweet meaning behind mysterious San Diego billboard
SAN DIEGO – After nearly two weeks of speculation, the mystery surrounding a billboard in Pacific Beach has finally been solved.
The billboard which stands on the corner of Garnett Avenue and Mission Bay Boulevard went up on Sept. 15. It shows an old photograph of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a wedding dress. In the upper corner of the sign, a message reads “Meant to Be.”
“Oh, that’s really sweet,” said passerby Dinavia Serro , reacting to the billboard. “That sign caught my eye."
“What is this?” asked another passing driver. “Why would someone put this here, and what does it mean?”
Hundreds of others asked the same question on Pacific Beach’s Facebook page. After a week of speculation, KSWB finally solved the mystery.
“I couldn’t believe it!” laughed Chrisoula Gelastopoulos, the woman on the sign. “I was mad. I was embarrassed. I asked him how he could do this. But then I started to cry, because it was so sweet.”
Chrisoula and her husband John met in San Diego in the 1970s. He was 19. She was 18. He asked her out for a slice of apple pie.
“What did we know?” John said of relationships at that age. “People ask was it love at first sight? At that age, it’s something else.”
Three kids, three grandkids, and a successful career later, they have built a beautiful family and life together, but with their 40th anniversary and Chrisoula's birthday on the horizon, John wanted to go big.
“I wanted to show the world she was the one behind me,” he said. “So, I came up with that.”
The couple says they had no idea the billboard had caught the community's attention or sparked so much curiosity. But now John says he is feeling the pressure to come up with an even bigger 50th anniversary gift.
“I got 10 years to work on it," he said.
KSWB asked him how long the billboard would remain. He said it could be a long time because he purchased the billboard as part of the gift.