These Oak Cliff couples are testaments to love story sequels
Kimball graduates David Mendez and Jayne Fisher met through the Oak Cliff Boomers Facebook group. Photo by Tiffany Noelle Fisher
It’s February, and love is in the air! For some Oak Cliff boomers, that air has certainly produced results.
“I never, ever, ever, ever thought I’d even think about getting married again, but then I met [choking up] the sweetest woman in the world. [Now tearing up.] Now I’m getting married,” explained David Mendez at the April 2012 wedding shower hosted by the Oak Cliff Boomers Facebook group at the Charco Broiler on Jefferson, “and I’m so happy.”
And just how did he meet his then future wife?
Jayne Brumit Fisher began attending the Facebook group’s parties and says she noticed David right away.
“But there was one problem. I thought the lady with him was his wife.”
At the dance event, Mendez (Kimball ’67) gazed at the table where Fisher (Kimball ’73) sat with a woman she assumed was Mendez’s wife. But Fisher noticed that each time Mendez spun and faced the table, he was mouthing, “Help!” pleading to be rescued from his current dance partner. Fisher leaned over and said to the woman, “You need to go dance with your husband.”
“The woman started laughing,” Fisher giggles. “Then I found out she was his sister, not his wife.” Fisher immediately walked over and asked for the rest of the dance. “We started dating and, in less than a year after our first dance, we were married.”
“It’s wonderful. We are so very happy,” Jayne (now) Mendez shares. “I think it is true that love is sweeter as we get older.”
Bruce Edwards and Celia Hopkins met when they were 15 and dated their senior year at Kimball High School (even attending the 1965 prom together). More than three decades later, they rekindled their romance.
When 15-year-olds Bruce Edwards and Celia Hopkins first met on Aug. 25, 1963, they became instant friends. Often, when the young Dallas Morning News carrier threw his route at 4 a.m., he’d knock on Hopkins’s window to see if she wanted to join him. She usually took a pass. The two ended up dating quite a lot during their 1965 senior year at Kimball but split it off when they attended the same college. Hopkins married someone else, as did Edwards, and the pair had no further communication … until 1996. While planning for her junior high school reunion, one of the workers, a detective, asked Hopkins who she’d like to find. She answered, “Bruce Edwards,” and paid the guy $20. “That was the best $20 I ever spent,” Hopkins chuckles.
Edwards was divorced and Hopkins, after first being widowed, was in the same process. They began seeing each other and the relationship rekindled.
“He never pressured me about anything,” Hopkins says. “He was patient and always very sweet.”
Hopkins’s late father and her mother had always been sad that the high school sweethearts hadn’t married. So after Edwards’s proposal, Hopkins’s mother, wagging her finger, responded, “I always told you he was a nice boy.” And Edwards’s dad? “Well, it’s about time!” he laughed.
The pair exchanged vows on Aug. 18, 2001, but then, along with some family members, flew to St. Lucia to repeat the same, on the beach, on Aug. 25, exactly 38 years after they first met.
Adamson alumni Bill Titsworth and Minnie Elliott Busby met more than 50 years after they graduated high school and married on their alma mater’s front steps.
Minnie Elliott Busby, as an Adamson alumni association board member (class of ’59), visited hospitalized alums. That’s where she first met Bill Titsworth, class of ‘60.
Titsworth was lying in a hospital bed, with a full beard and a head full of shaggy hair (due to his lengthy hospital stay). Busby, along with another board member, chatted with him, and, as was her duty, visited the patient several additional times. Evidently, she made an impression.
Later, the now clean-shaven Titsworth called, asking Busby to join him for lunch. The pair began watching movies together and discovered that, as Titsworth says, “we enjoyed each others’ company.” In less than 18 months, while driving back from Oak Cliff, Busby’s future fiancé proposed the following: “I don’t really recommend this, but would you care to marry me?”
Bubsy, in her trademark, straightforward tone, responded with, “When and where?”
Quickly understanding his need of a fast answer, Titsworth replied, “Feb. 29 — so I’ll only forget our anniversary once every four years — and on the front steps of Adamson.”
“Well, only after I ask your mother for your hand in marriage,” Busby responded.
After their Feb. 14 wedding license purchase — what Busby says was probably a laughable moment for the county licensing office’s young staff: two 70-year-olds purchasing a marriage license on Valentine’s Day — the couple exchanged vows just as the groom had proposed, on the front steps of W. H. Adamson High School, on Feb. 29, 2012.
The Rev. Donald Coke (Adamson ’44) officiated, with a small group of witnesses that included the Adamson principal and several alumni. Dressed in blue and white, and a blue and white bridal bouquet (to honor the school colors), the Titsworths are, as far as I know, the only couple in Oak Cliff — or possibly the state — to marry on their high school steps. (Maybe the country. Maybe the world!)
There’s a 1960s song titled “The Second Time Around,” and it certainly seems that the song rings true for the Mendezes, Edwardses, and Titworths. Ah, love! Sometimes it is sweeter the second time around.
