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1962 high school sweethearts plan wedding
Here at the Cafe, where we believe in happy endings, we’re rather pleased with this week’s story. It’s about Rose – our very own Rose Hooper who used to work at this newspaper – and Carl Garrett, who was her boyfriend in 1962, when both were students at Waynesville Township High School.
According to Carl, it was love at 300 yards. He was playing football with other neighborhood boys in the churchyard of Allens Creek Baptist Church one August day when Rose strolled into view.
“I just knew she was the one,” Carl said last week. “She was so beautiful.”
During a church youth group outing a few days later, Carl maneuvered himself into the seat next to Rose and summoned up the courage to ask her out.
“I just knew she was going to reject me, but she didn’t,” Carl said.
By that time he had learned that Rose would be staying with her grandmother in Waynesville for the next year. Her father – a career military man – had been stationed in Japan, but her parents didn’t want to uproot her since she was in high school, Rose said.
After their first date, which was to the Waynesville drive-in (neither remembers what movie they saw), Carl and Rose were inseparable that whole school year.
Carl describes one outing they took to the Pisgah National Forest in a 1960 Mercury.
“That car had a huge windshield,” he said. “We were driving over into the sun and back into the sun, and both of our faces were really sunburned the next day.”
Life was good until school was out and Rose’s parents decided that their oldest daughter should join them in Japan after all, despite her protests that Waynesville (and Carl) suited her just fine.
“My mother said it would be a big adventure – the chance of a lifetime,” Rose said. “She said it would be a test of our love.”
While Rose wasn’t quite sure all that was accurate, she listened to her folks and said “sayonara” to Carl. The two promised to write, and they did. At first they wrote to each other every day but after a while they tapered off, Rose said.
After two years in Japan, Rose came back to the United States but flew straight to the Air Force base in Ohio where her dad was stationed next. Before she could figure out how to get back to Western North Carolina, Carl had joined the Army. By the time Rose enrolled at Western Carolina University, Carl was in Louisiana and soon after that, California; all that distance added up to the end of their youthful romance.
When they ran into each other in 1975 at a WCU event, Rose and Carl were each married to someone else, and both had young children. Looking back on that chance encounter, Rose and Carl both acknowledge that they had been aware of smoldering feelings but didn’t act on them, because, with small children in both homes, it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.
“I thought that was the end of it,” Rose said.
And until another 25 or so years had passed, it was. Then one day Carl stopped in Sylva on his way back to Waynesville from Cashiers and happened to pick up a copy of The Sylva Herald.
When he saw Rose’s byline, he was amazed to find she still worked at the paper and surprised that she was going by her maiden name, Hooper. What Carl didn’t know was that while Rose was working here in 2003, she was on her second tour. She’d written for the paper during the 1970s, but she left for other opportunities, returning to the newsroom around 1995.
Carl then engaged in a little online research, visiting www.thesylvaherald.com, to confirm that our reporter was, indeed, his high school sweetheart.
Yet Carl still couldn’t bring himself to call her. Instead, he followed Sylva news through our online edition. When he noticed an old picture that he thought would be of interest to Blue Ridge Paper co-worker Tony Hooper, who has family from Jackson County, Carl printed it out and encouraged Tony to call Rose and ask about the picture – and, oh by the way, while he was talking to her, maybe he could get Carl an e-mail address.
“I was pretty excited to get an e-mail from him,” Rose said. That was in the summer of 2004. Just about the time Rose and Carl were getting used to the idea of seeing each other again and making plans to meet, Hurricanes Frances and Ivan slammed into Canton, closing the paper plant and cutting off Carl’s computer access.
“We were planning a trip to the Outer Banks, but the storms and flooding cut us off from each other,” Rose said. “And then I changed jobs (Rose left the newsroom to become a public information officer at Southwestern Community College.) and I had a different e-mail address.
This time their luck was better than back in the ’60s, and despite communication challenges, love prevailed. Rose and Carl made in to the coast in 2005 and are once again the center of each other’s universes.
“I feel like I’ve come full circle,” Carl said during an interview for this column. “All you need to get across is how much I love this lady.”
For Rose’s part, she’s equally smitten and just as sure all’s now right with the world.
“One moment I might feel every one of my 59 years, but in the next I am 15 again,” she said. “We can be in a crowd of people, and he can reach out and touch my hand or just look at me with that special smile where his dimples twinkle and instantly I feel 15 all over again. The moment he stepped back in my life, he made me realize what I’d been missing and made my life complete.”
And that happy ending? It’s slated for this Sunday, when Rose and Carl say “I do” 44 years after a boy looked up from a football game to see his true love.
Rose and Carl, then and now
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