Reidsville couple rediscover one another

By Heather Smith

Published: August 11, 2008

Bobby Walker remembers passing Gladys Apple in the halls of Reidsville Senior High School. Gladys remembers Bobby as tall and quiet. They graduated without really getting to know the other.

Now, they giggle and hold hands, stare soft-eyed at each other and sigh. They’ve been married for several weeks and seem astounded at their happiness.

She is 71. He is 70.

They graduated in 1955, married other people, were widowed and spent several years alone before finding each other again. Meanwhile, they were passing acquaintances, better friends with the other’s spouse. Their oldest sons were school friends, but from high school until 17 months ago, they were not close.

“I didn’t really know her,” Bobby said. “We didn’t have classes together, but I thought she was cute. I think she looks better now.”

“Oh, Bobby,” Gladys said, blushing.

Bobby lost his wife, Nancy, eight years ago. Gladys recalled seeing him just after her death, sadly trailing after his daughter-in-law as she shopped at Rose’s.

“He was so sad and so lonely. He didn’t look like himself,” she said.

Then Gladys’s husband Lawrence died in 2004. With her children grown and tending to their own families, Gladys lived alone except for Jenny, her poodle. That is how she lived for several years

before her phone rang one February evening.

“This is Bobby Walker,” the voice over the phone said. He’d seen her as he drove home down Barnes Street, where Gladys lives. She was walking Jenny, Bobby recognized her and began to think about asking her out. “Then I thought she’s probably going with someone else. But I waited about a week,” Bobby said. “I thought about it. Then I called her.”

Gladys was delighted to hear from her old classmate. They spent a few moments catching up before Bobby asked, “What’re you doing?”

“Making hot chocolate,” she said, then slyly added, “If you were close by, I’d give you a sip.”

Gladys said she was a little shocked at what she’d just said.

“I’m usually a shy person, and not flirtatious, but that’s just what came out,” she said.

Bobby remembers stammering until mustering the question he called to ask her.

“You ever go out with anyone?” he asked her.

“Well, sometimes,” she said.

She had been on one date since Lawrence died, but their evening ended without even the first spark. She kept to herself mostly, she and Jenny.

“Well, would you go out with me?” he asked.

“Well,” she began, “I’ll look at my schedule. Maybe, if you have the time and I have the time.”

Of course she had the time, she explained later, but she didn’t want him to think that.

“Well, if you do, just call me back,” Bobby said, and left it at that.

She didn’t. Four days later, her phone rang again.

“Are you going to go out with me or not?” he asked her playfully. She agreed.

And was he nervous asking her?

“Uh huh,” he said, emphatically.

“What do you mean?” Gladys said with mock reproach.

“I was scared you’d turn me down,” he said.

“Oh, Bobby,” she began, but fell silent to gaze at him.

Their first date was dinner at Applebee’s. Before picking her up, Bobby sent Gladys a dozen red roses.

“I called all my friends and said, ‘You ought to see these pretty flowers,’” she gushed, and reached across the table to him. “He sent me flowers many times after that. I finally made him stop because of the cost.”

“You’re worth it,” he said, taking her hand.

That night, Gladys decided she liked Bobby. Bobby decided something a little more ambitious.

“When I got home that night, I told myself I’d marry that woman,” he said.

As winter melted into spring, Gladys and Bobby continued to see each other. He told her he loved her, and eventually she admitted she loved him too. Neither sat alone in their empty houses. Bobby began going to Gladys’s church. Jenny began to share her mistress without complaint.

Slowly, Bobby began hinting at marriage, but Gladys was resistant. Not because she didn’t adore him, but because of

their age and because of what pain losing Lawrence caused her.

“Going through that, losing a husband or a wife, it does something to you. It makes you afraid to venture into another relationship,” Gladys said. “You’re just so afraid of losing someone else you love.”

Her reluctance didn’t keep Bobby from trying.

One night before going to dinner, Bobby took a ring from his pocket. Immediately, she told him she couldn’t take it.

“He told me just to wear it, and I could give it back at the end of the night,” she said.

So she did. She began to like it, too.

“When we got to dinner, there was one of my old classmates sitting clear on the other side of the dining room,” Gladys said. “You know I marched all the way over to her to show her this ring?”

But at the end of the night, she removed it, pressed it into his palm and folded his hand closed, saying, “I just can’t take it right now.”

But instead of taking it, he told her to wear it as a birthstone ring. So she did.

“And I wore it to church and everyone wanted to look at it,” she said.

And June 14, Gladys and Bobby were married at Pleasant View Assembly of God by Pastor Gary Loftis. Gladys’s four sons, Bobby’s four sons and one daughter, their spouses, her nine grandchildren, his eight grandchildren, a second generation of spouses, her eight great-grandchildren and his only great-grandchild happily watched the union.

They honeymooned in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and on return to Reidsville, Bobby moved into Gladys’s little house on Barnes Street. Husband and wife said it’s hard to recall those long, solitary days.

“It seems like we’ve always had each other,” Gladys said, squeezing Bobby’s hand.

• Staff writer Heather J. Smith can be reached at or 349-4331, ext. 16.