Quote of the Day

I know that this site is mostly supposed to be about manly things and whatever, but as a man, you should be able to admit when something is pretty sweet. Like this story of high school sweethearts who married 68 years after they broke up.

It’s been more than 68 years since West High School sweethearts Carl King and Dorothy Stallings started dating.

The couple corresponded when King joined the Navy and was shipped out to the Pacific during World War II. When King returned to Texas in 1946, he and Stallings dated for two more years.

But they broke it off. Stallings stayed in the Waco area, where she was a school teacher. King got married and moved to the Gulf Coast, taking a job at a chemical company.

And that could have easily been the end of the story. But it wasn’t.

“When he married, I had to just put it out of my mind,” Stallings said in a phone interview Friday.

They went on with their lives. King, who’s 85, and his wife, Peggy, had four daughters (he now has about 40 grandchildren and great-grandchildren).

Stallings, 84, dated, but never married.

When King’s wife died in 2007, Stallings got in touch with King.

“I knew he was hurting and I wrote and told him if there was anything I could do I’d be glad to help, and sometimes it just helps to have someone to talk to,” she said.

King and Stallings started talking on the phone, and she would occasionally write letters.

In Houston for Christmas that year, Stallings said she asked if she could visit him in League City, where he was staying with one of his daughters, but he said he didn’t think it was a good idea.

On Easter in 2008, she asked again.

Stallings recalled telling King “ ‘there are some things I want to say, and I want to say them in person, not over the phone.’ ”

King agreed to the visit.

“We talked for four or five hours and didn’t even take time for lunch,” she said. “We started talking, and we said that there wasn’t a day that passed when we didn’t think of each other.”

It’s a good read, so check out the full article.

Love at long last: West High School sweethearts marry 68 years later [Waco Tribune]

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