Valentines reunited after half century apart
Published: February 13, 2005
Sometimes true stories do have happy endings.
That’s the case for a Kentucky man and his long-lost Valentine who were separated by circumstances more than 50 years ago only to be reunited in their golden years.
Dallas Layne, 72, of Pikeville, is celebrating Valentine’s Day with his new bride, 70-year-old Earlene Layne, who he first asked to marry him in 1952.
“She was my first love,” said Dallas Layne, who married Earlene in January in San Marcos, Texas, the spot where they first met more than half a century ago.
“First love and first marriage proposal for both of us,” she added.
Dallas and Earlene Layne met in the spring of 1952, when he was a 19-year-old airman stationed at the San Marcos Air Force Base in Texas and she was a 17-year-old high school student in nearby Georgetown, Texas.
Dallas Layne was driving around in his new car with a group of friends when they met a group of girls, including Earlene Innmon. After a few months, Layne and Innmon were engaged.
“Things were going quite well until I announced we would be married and I would be finishing my senior year in San Marcos, where Dallas was,” Earlene Layne said.
That’s when her mother wrote Dallas Layne a letter, telling him she disapproved and asking him to break things off.
“So he honored my mother’s request, and that was it,” Earlene Layne said. “And I never knew about the letter until the 1990s,” she said.
After that, the two did not see each other for nearly 50 years. They both married and had children - two boys and a girl for each.
But even during that time, Dallas Layne, now a Pikeville city commissioner, admits he thought of Earlene often. And by the late 1990s, both were single again - Earlene after her husband’s death, Dallas after three divorces.
During a trip to Texas, on a whim, Dallas Layne stopped in Georgetown and called Earlene on the telephone. They didn’t see each other that day, but they soon began exchanging letters. He visited a second time and the romance was rekindled.
“She was my ‘Yellow Rose of Texas,’” Dallas Layne said. “I used to sing that song to her.”
After so many years, they didn’t immediately recognize each other.
“Then I saw this classy lady sitting in a chair, and she had a yellow rose in her hand,” Dallas Layne said.
“I thought he’d know me if I had my yellow rose,” she said.
The couple were married Jan. 8 in San Marcos, and are now living in Pikeville.
Now, Dallas Layne tells his friends that he lived the lyrics of “Yellow Rose of Texas,” which starts:
“There’s a yellow rose in Texas, that I am going to see, Nobody else could miss her, not half as much as me. She cried so when I left her, it like to broke my heart. And if I ever find her, we nevermore will part.”
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