UC alumni discover a love that lasts at UC

Christina Hibbitt and Miles Davis were both UC students, but on different campuses, when they first met at a family gathering. Miles was a walk-on running back for the football team and was dating someone else at the time, but Christina made an impression on him. “I was wowed,” Miles recalls. “You could feel the energy she brought. She was energetic, happy. The joy that she obviously had about her was something that everyone picked up on.”

Nothing happened right away, but their roads crossed again. They had both grown up in Greater Cincinnati. They knew many of the same people. They even bought their eyeglasses from the same optometrist.

When Miles invited Christina out on their first date in 2009, she had graduated and he had left UC — temporarily, it turned out — to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a firefighter for the City of Cincinnati.

Their first date, a quiet dinner at a nice restaurant, was memorable, the second even more so. During a Memorial Day weekend party hosted by Alicia Reece, an Ohio state representative who would become a Hamilton County Commissioner, Christina sensed that she could have a future with Miles. “It was a real ‘aha moment’ for me,” she says.

“That was definitely a game-changing date,” Miles says. “It was kind of confirmation that we’re both on the same page. We were both thinking a lot of each other.”

They married in 2012. Christina was working toward her master’s degree in social work at that time. Having grown up in a family that included professional cooks, she was also acquiring a reputation as an exceptional baker. 

“I started bringing cookie samples to class and also to the UC Medical Center’s emergency room where I was working,” she says. “In both places people kept saying these were the best cookies they’d ever had. People began offering to pay me for making cookies for them. When a UC security guard offered to pay me $15 for a dozen chocolate chip cookies, it clicked for me. I knew I’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but in that moment I thought, wow, I could start my own cookie business if people were going to pay me. I thought I’d like to provide people with a homemade-style cookie. I came home and presented the idea to Miles.”

He was cautious at first, but Miles knew how good those cookies were. “She brought them to monthly family dinners, and they were gone within five minutes.”

Today the Davis Cookie Collection is flourishing, with a storefront and a cookie truck that appears at UC events. Employees include UC students.

Miles is now a lieutenant with the Cincinnati Fire Department and the owner of an associate’s degree in emergency services from UC Blue Ash. The couple are parents of three children, one of whom will soon be attending football camp at UC. 

“We’re so appreciative to have been UC students,” Christina says. “Education is very important, and it gave us the foundation for our business. All those writing skills equipped us to be business owners. UC is a huge part of the story, and without it we wouldn’t be where we are.”

Greek life was an important part of the campus community in the 1950s. For Jim Reger and Kathryn (Babe) Gallenstein Reger, it was the springboard that led to 57 years of marriage.

Jim came to UC from Dayton, Ohio, on a Sheffield Scholarship in 1954. He studied mechanical engineering and joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. Babe grew up in Cincinnati, enrolled in the Teacher’s College in 1955 and joined the Alpha Chi Omega sorority, which was barely a hail-Mary pass away from the Sig Ep fraternity. Babe and Jim met during an Alpha Chi-Sig Ep party and were soon “pinned” to one another.

Jim was on the ground floor of UC’s first-in-the-nation co-op system. “It was mandatory for the colleges of engineering, business administration, and applied arts,” he says. Following his freshman year, he performed rotations at Sheffield Corporation, a manufacturer that revolutionized precision inspection equipment during World War II. Jim rose from doing “menial, beginner’s work” to designing parts for Sheffield’s air gage instrumentation.

He lived in the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house between work sections in Dayton for five years. “We had a live-in house mother,” Jim says. “Study hours were enforced, and no alcoholic beverages were permitted. Girls were not allowed after hours. Believe it, or not, it was generally true. I do have to admit that my roommate John Fesenmeier's family owned the West Virginia Pilsener brewing company in Huntington. Sometimes, he brought us back a case of beer. We hid it to cool outside, on our third-floor window sill.”

While Jim enjoyed UC sports in the era of All-American basketball star Oscar Robertson, Babe served on UC’s Social Board, which coordinated major campus functions. She served as president in 1959. “Our Sig-Ep Bearcat reunions were handled by the guys for the first 25 years,” Jim says. “The last 30-plus years were planned mostly by Babe. It is in her DNA.”

Babe and Jim were married two weeks before they graduated together in 1959. They are the parents of four children (including one UC graduate) and 10 grandchildren (including two Bearcat graduates). At their 50th graduation reunion in 2009, they became “Golden Bearcats.”