Tennessee High School Sweethearts Wed After 63 Years Apart

high school sweethearts at soda fountain 1950s
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Caroline Reeves and Eddie Lamm, who were high school sweethearts in the 1950s, recently tied the knot after a separation of six decades.

Their love, which first blossomed 63 years ago, has now been rekindled into a heartwarming union, CBS News reported.

“Once I saw her, it was all over,” 85-year-old Lamm told CBS News.

In high school, Lamm made 65 cents an hour delivering the Tennesseean newspaper around town. He’d use his paycheck to take Reeves out for French fries and a Coke, but Reeves didn’t care it wasn’t a fancy dinner. She said she could have committed to him for the rest of her life had he only given her his class ring.

Three years older than Reeves, Lamm was set to study at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He joined the ROTC program and had planned to fly planes in the Air Force. The last time they went out together, right before dropping her off at her house, Lamm kissed Reeves for the last time until the next millennium.

Reeves knew that it was the end of their relationship.

“I opened that car door and I got out of that car and ran up the steps and slammed the door and went upstairs and cried all night,” she said. “That was it.”

Lamm served 21 years in the Air Force, and Reeves was a magazine writer, interior designer, and world traveler. She was crowned Miss Tennessee in 1959. Two years after being crowned, Reeves and Lamm both got married to different people.

In 2021, two days before their 60th wedding anniversary, Lamm’s wife passed away from Lou Gehrig’s disease. By then, Reeves had been a widow for 20 years from her second husband. The former sweethearts were separated by thousands of miles, as Lamm lived in California and Reeves in Nashville. That would soon change after Lamm got the urge to call Reeves in April 2022.

The pair talked and Lamm flew out to see her. Reeves picked him up from the airport and said seeing him took her breath away.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire life. I just can’t even explain it. So I got out of the parking lot, zoom, zoom, zoom, went around and found the FedEx parking lot,” Reeves told CBS. “And it was the warehouse. It was closed at night and they had all these security lights. And I got out and jumped around and we hugged and kissed … and I remember looking up at the security lights and insects were swirling all around.”

Five days into their visit, Lamm asked Reeves to move to California with him. He asked her to be his wife three months later. Her engagement ring was his class ring she had yearned for all those years ago.

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