BRIDAL Guide
Photo courtesy Hayley Beal Photography LLC
Cooking up marriage
Nolan McGowan and Yoli Salas are engaged to be married in 2024.
in McGowan’s Kitchen BY JANE TURPIN MOORE
“I was probably trying to impress her,” admitted McGowan, 36. “I’d ordered The Globe some tremendously spicy wings and Yoli WORTHINGTON — A shared devohandled them a bit better than I did. tion to community service, plus com“Tears were running down my face, mon interests in adventurous travel and dining, led to love for Yoli Salas and like I had just won an Oscar, and I might have drained her drink. Nolan McGowan. “I like to think I’m a pretty tough perBut don’t forget about the hot-asson, but that was when I realized … she heck wings. On one of their early dates at an Oko- was a bit tougher than me.” McGowan has had that opinion boji Asian restaurant in the spring of 2019, Salas dazzled McGowan with her affirmed many times since the hot wings experience; consider that Salas fortitude.
became the second female firefighter in Worthington’s history when she joined the squad in 2014 (she’s currently the only woman on the team, and Salas’s fire colleagues affectionately call McGowan the “fire wife”), she maintains a hectic work and volunteer schedule and she is bravely battling uterine cancer, a diagnosis she first received in December 2021. “I had my first surgery in January 2022, and then I started radiation on my birthday in February 2022,” said
Salas. “The whole ‘in sickness and in health’ thing worked backwards for us because at the time we weren’t even engaged — but we’d already started to work through life’s obstacles together. Nolan has been very supportive through the whole thing, and without him, it would be a tougher journey.” McGowan confirms that, after a little less than two years of dating, Salas’s health crisis forced greater clarity in how he felt about their relationship.
MCGOWAN SALAS: Page 4