This is a nice little story about a guy that we know that was written by Dave Bakke from the Springfield State Journal Register..... it takes a few minutes to read but if you have some time it will touch your heart.

High school sweethearts marry 60 years after parting

By Dave Bakke
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Apr 02, 2009 @ 11:54 PM
Last update Apr 03, 2009 @ 12:08 PM
Their friends at Springfield High School in the mid-1940s just knew that Georgiann Quick and James D. Bredehoft would marry each other. Georgiann and J.D., as he was known, kept steady company for a couple of years in high school.
They first met at a youth group meeting at Christ Episcopal Church at Sixth and Jackson streets. Their love life revolved around music. They went to tons of dances. They shared a love of classical music concerts. They walked together around Springfield. They went to the prom. It was meant to be — until it wasn’t.
Though they were the same age, Georgiann graduated from SHS early, in 1946, but J.D. had another school year to go. She enrolled at Springfield Junior College, and he began his senior year, fully expecting that they would marry after his graduation in 1947.
But their parents, who knew each other, were of the same mind about this marriage. You’re too young, they said. You have to finish school, they said. They forbade it.
Georgiann’s father worked for the phone company. After the war ended, he was transferred to Berlin, Germany, to help rebuild that country’s communications network. Georgiann reluctantly went with her parents.
On the day she left Springfield, J.D. took her to the train station. It hurt. It hurt a lot. They wrote to each other for a while. But then Georgiann stopped answering J.D.’s letters. They were half a world apart. It was time to go on with their lives — separately.
J.D. joined the Navy after high school. Then he started a long career with Central Illinois Public Service Co. and lived in Beardstown. He married Lillian Stinnet in 1950.
Georgiann saw Europe and Russia. She married an Army sergeant she met in Germany. He was killed in Korea. She married again. Her second husband died about 30 years ago, and that was enough of marriage for her. She lived alone in Calumet City, near Chicago.
As her life went through its passages, she thought of J.D. Bredehoft often. He was a presence that came and went, only to return again when she was alone. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was guilt over the way she left him and the way she stopped answering his letters.
A couple of years ago, her daughter-in-law, Cynthia Hamilton, told Georgiann to start living again, to reconnect with the outside world after so many years alone. Georgiann’s thoughts turned again to J.D.
Cynthia asked her to write his name down and she would do an Internet search on him. She found him in Beardstown. She called the phone number. It was disconnected.
Later, Georgiann’s cousin from Virden came to visit her in Calumet City. Georgiann asked her to bring the Springfield city directory, just to see if any of her old friends from SHS were still in town. Springfield would be a place to go, and those old friends would be someone she could connect with again.
Browsing through the city directory, she saw the name “Mike Bredehoft.” Oh my, she thought, how many “Bredehofts” could there be in central Illinois? Was this J.D’s family? Could she at least find out whether J.D. was alive?
About the time she was debating whether to call Mike, she had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. She opened her fortune cookie. Guess what her fortune said? It said, “Follow the dreams of your youth.”
That is what people like to call “a sign from God.”
So Georgiann went home, knocked down a shot of Southern Comfort for courage and picked up the telephone. Yes, said Mike Bredehoft, I know him. He’s my grandfather. Yes, he’s alive. Yes, he’s fine. Who is this?
At the same Springfield station where they said goodbye in 1947, a nervous J.D. Bredehoft stood 60 years later, waiting for a train to arrive this time and for the woman to whom he said goodbye so long ago to come down its steps.
J.D. hadn’t been in the train station for about 50 years. That’s almost as long as he and Lillian were married until her death in 2006. As he waited for the train to come, he looked around and thought about 1947 and about now and about what the years may have done to them both.
The station, now an Amtrak station, was nicer than he remembered it. They have taken out the pot-bellied stove, he noticed.
The train from Chicago pulled in and Georgiann got off, after all these years. Lord, what they must have felt in that moment after all the weddings, the funerals, and all the children raised, the grandkids, the proud moments and the worries.
She was nervous. He was, too.
They went to Panera Bread to eat and to talk. Then J.D. took Georgiann to see his house and meet Mike. The house is by the lake, and on the way, Georgiann wasn’t quite sure where they were going because this all had been country when they had dated.
They had a good visit that first time. When J.D. dropped her off at that train station again for her trip home, he said, “Well, are you coming back?”
“We’ll see,” she replied.
And she got back on that train and she left him again. J.D. had seen this movie before.
But she did come back. And she came back again. And when six months of this had gone by, Georgiann did something she thought she would never do after her second husband died. She proposed.
Everybody at Springfield High in the mid-1940s knew this would happen, they just didn’t know it would take 63 years.
J.D. and Georgiann were married on the 17th of January at Grace Lutheran Church in Springfield, just down the street from Christ Episcopal Church where they first met.
“The pastor says we’re the oldest people he’s ever married,” Georgiann says.
They are both 80 years old, and they live in the house by the lake where everything was corn and dirt when they first met.It was that fortune cookie that really did it. She followed the dream of her youth.
Sitting at their dining room table, telling this story, Georgiann said this: “Life is full of mysterious miracles, and it’s a miracle this turned out this way.” I liked that quote.
She didn’t want me to mention the part about the shot of Southern Comfort — afraid of how it would make her look to the strangers who will read this. But it was so true to life and it said so much about what it took for her to follow that dream of her youth so long after that dream had died, that I had to put that in, too. I think she’ll understand