Wedding bells

Sometime around 7 p.m. today, a wedding will take place in the Owen Rose Garden, under the Washington-Jefferson Street Bridge, on the south side of the Willamette River.

A 66-year-old woman will walk down the “aisle” and join arms with a 68-year-old man.

This is the wedding that was supposed to happen 47 years, 10 months and 26 days ago.

But sometimes, love just has to wait.

Has to age like a fine wine.

Has to mature like a Douglas fir in the middle of an old-growth forest.

Has to find itself again decades later, through some newfangled thing called social media. Has to grow through that initial Facebook message, then myriad phone conversations, then learn how to Skype and eventually hop on a New Year’s Eve train from Sacramento to Eugene and wrap its arms around that cute strawberry blonde with the blue eyes that will twinkle at you, God willing, for the rest of your life.

“It was like all those stupid, corny commercials and TV shows and movies you see where two people haven’t seen each other in forever,” Joyce Ellen says. “And we just hugged and hugged and hugged.”

But let’s back up a bit, back to that initial meeting almost 50 years ago in his San Jose apartment. It was either late 1964 or early 1965 — who can remember, it’s been so long?

She was a 16-year-old junior at Blackford High School in Santa Clara, Calif., and he was 19, a student at San Jose City College. There were maybe five or six people there. A mutual friend had introduced them.

“And then we talked for a few minutes,” Joyce recalls. “And then I told the mutual friend how cute he was.”

The friend gave Glen Reynolds her phone number. He called the next day and asked her out.

He picked her up at her parents’ house in Santa Clara. Her dad was there waiting, in his sheriff’s uniform with a gun holstered to his hip, lifting weights behind a couch.

“It was a little intimidating,” Glen recalls.

They went to what would become their “favorite place,” Joyce says, a nearby McDonald’s. They talked. They laughed. They fell in love.

They dated for months, maybe a year, until he joined the Army and went to basic training at Ford Ord on Monterey Bay in the fall of 1965, then transferred to Fort Benning, Ga., having committed himself to two years of service.

They stayed in touch, and he eventually proposed over the phone. She went to visit him in Georgia that summer of 1966, after graduating high school. Then a date was set. They would marry on Sept. 17 at the First Methodist Church in Campbell, Calif., Glen’s hometown, just south of Santa Clara.

“Mr. and Mrs. W.L. Ferguson request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Joyce Ellen to Mr. Glen Reynolds …” reads the invitation she kept all these years.

And then …

“Everything just kind of fell apart,” Glen says.

“Psychedelia hit the area,” Joyce explains.

She was changing. It was the summer before the Summer of Love. She was becoming a hippie and experimenting with drugs.

He was an Army man now, his hair growing in the opposite direction of everyone else’s.

“I think we were both pretty upset,” Glen says. “But I think we realized it was the right thing to do at the time.”

She was worried he’d go to Vietnam. His buddies at the base were leaving every day for the war.

Still, there she was a year later, in the fall of 1967, picking him up at the airport, after he was out of the Army, despite having recently married someone else.

Those impulsive nuptials wouldn’t even last a year, though, and Joyce and Glen reunited and moved in together in Felton, near Santa Cruz.

He got a job assembling computers for IBM “back in the day when they took up whole rooms,” while she spent most of her time hanging out with friends who were caught up in the signs of the times: drugs and flower power and protesting that god-awful thing in ’Nam.

“I wasn’t giving him the respect he deserved, so we just kind of broke up again,” Joyce says.

She came to Eugene in 1970, not realizing she was moving to Oregon maybe for the rest of her life. She was just giving a friend a lift. They became involved, lived together for several years and had a daughter named Daisy.

“It was a shock”

Then, sometime in the mid-1970s, Joyce was hanging out at Murphy & Me, a popular Eugene bar on Franklin Boulevard, when Glen walked in.

He’d been in town a few months, having come north with a friend who wanted some help fixing up old houses. He had no idea Joyce had been living in Eugene for several years.

“It was a shock to see her sitting in that pool hall,” Glen says.

They became friends again. He even baby-sat Daisy a few times while Joyce went out with a boyfriend she was dating at the time.

Glen ended up moving back to California, and they lost touch once more — for 39 years.

The last time he remembered seeing her she was riding her bike down a Eugene street, with a friend. Both were topless, he recalls with a laugh.

Decades later, they tried to find each other on the Internet, to no avail. She remembers looking up “Glen Reynolds” on Facebook a few years ago, but it’s not exactly the world’s most uncommon name. And would she even recognize him after all these years?

“We probably wouldn’t have recognized each other if we’d been standing next to each other in line at the store,” Glen says.
“I would have recognized your eyes,” says Joyce. shooting him a sly, loving glance. “Of course, you’re so shy, you probably wouldn’t have seen me!”

“Hey there”

Glen, who by 2013 was living in Placerville, Calif., just east of Sacramento, had been married to a woman named Nancy for 26 years when she died in March 2013 of congestive heart failure at age 63. It was his second marriage.

Last summer, he thought about Joyce again, as he had often over the years, just as she had thought about him.

He tried searching Facebook, initially, but couldn’t find her, not realizing she was now using her middle name as her last name. Then he searched for Blackford High School alumni and made the discovery, allowing him to finally find her on Facebook.

He sent a message on Sept. 8: “Hi Joyce: It’s been a long time … good to know that you’re still around. If you’re interested in catching up, send me a message sometime. (smiley face). Take care, Glen.”

Not a regular on social media, Joyce did not see the message for weeks. But when she did, she was astounded.

She responded on Oct. 26: “Hey there. Can’t hardly believe it’s you after all this time. Lots I’d love to catch up on … I like ur liberal attitudes cuz I’m still that way too. …

She mentioned that Daisy was now 40, and he said that “I am still known as the old hippe by my family. lol.”

“Still a bit hippie-chick myself,” Joyce responded.

After several more Facebook messages, she gave him her number, and he called on Nov. 3. This led to hours and hours of phone conversations, until they eventually communicated via Skype — allowing them to see each other live on their computer screens — in December, with the help of their more tech-savvy daughters.

Initially, they just stared at each other. Long time, indeed.

“And then we couldn’t figure out how to hang up from Skype,” laughs Joyce, who is convinced the reason she began having premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) in her heart last fall, so much so that she went to the doctor, was from all the excitement.

First and last

On Dec. 31, Glen hopped on an Amtrak train bound for Eugene, arriving 14 hours later. Joyce and Daisy (Havens Merrill) were waiting, having dinner and drinks at a restaurant next to the Eugene Amtrak station.

The train was late. But when it pulled in, Joyce ran out there so fast that Daisy didn’t have time to get her phone ready for the big hug photo.

Glen intended to stay for a couple of weeks at her home on Olive Street, between 15th and 16th avenues. He ended up staying a month, largely because they were both deathly ill with a virus those first couple of weeks, both having awakened on New Year’s Day feeling awful.

Although they slept together in her bed, they agreed “not to fool around” for awhile, until they figured out just what this was all about. Instead, they talked and watched TV, made fun of each other, got to know each other again and laughed and laughed just like they did almost a half century ago.

After a month, he went home to California, then came back a week later.

“Came right back,” Joyce says. “Couldn’t stand it.”

They decided they would marry — it will be the third marriage for both — and live in his home in Placerville. They went down there for three weeks to get the house ready for her to move in, then came back in the spring, having decided to spend the summer in Eugene. They ultimately decided it was better they stay here for good.

They went to Kay Jewelers at Valley River Center in April, and he got on his knees and put the ring on her finger and made it official.

“And the feeling was just as strong as ever,” Joyce says.

“Stronger,” Glen says. “We’ve learned a lot over the years.”

Sitting next to each other on the couch in the 1930s-era home they just bought together off River Road, they are snug, their hands in each others laps, often gazing into each other’s eyes like the two lovestruck teenagers they once were.

“There are a lot of people out there, kind of wondering, if they’ll ever have love again,” says Joyce, a longtime respiratory therapist who recently retired. “And everybody we’ve told this story to just beams with recognition how special it is. And we’ve been getting a lot of love back. So maybe there is someone (else) out there who realizes it is possible.”

It’s all been rather mind-blowing, she says.

“We were each other’s first real boyfriend and girlfriend, and we’ll be each other’s last,” Glen says.

Follow Mark on Twitter @delmont5 . Email [email protected] .