By Sam Doughton
Editor-in-Chief
Be careful the company you keep in high school. You never know if you’ll be with them until “death do you part.”
Many couples that dated while they walked the hallowed halls of RJR went on to get married later in life. Arts Magnet Director Karen Morris married her husband John in the summer after his junior year of college, after the two had been dating since their senior year at Reynolds.
“John and I met in sixth grade at Brunson,” Morris said. “We did NOT like each other at all. The first spark (of romance) came as lab partners at Wiley (Middle School), though we did not really date until we were in high school. The transition to dating was slow and strange at times: Notes were written and passed daily; Scrabble, cards, Trivial Pursuit, etc., played. I can remember having late-night phone conversations – with a spiral cord; this was before portable phones and I had only recently gotten a phone in my bedroom, and when my parents walked down the hall to their bedroom, I had to be silent and pretend to be asleep. Sometimes, they saw the cord coming from the wall and under my covers as I feigned sleep. Then I was really in trouble!”
The couple enjoyed plenty of fun times at RJR, though, creating memorable moments that still stand out today.
“Sometimes, I would come out to my car and find a note and a flower under the windshield wipers,” Morris said. “Sometimes, there would be a knock on the classroom door and John would be there saying, ‘Guidance needs to see Karen.’ We used to have guidance and office pages who would do errands for them and go get students out of class when they were needed. John was NOT a guidance page and I was NOT needed by guidance!”
For Class of ’82 graduate Katy Flagler, something as simple as a seating chart changed the course of her life. She met her husband, John Fleer, at Paisley Middle School, and the couple began dating their junior year at RJR.
“In ninth grade at Paisley, Flagler and Fleer were alphabetized next to each other in homeroom,” Flagler said. “I had a really hard time with geometry and John helped me every morning in homeroom. He was always so patient with me and he seemed happy to help. We dated other people then, but we considered each other ‘best friends.’
“When we got to Reynolds for 11th grade, people kept asking us if we were dating,” Flagler said. “We kept saying ‘No, we’re just friends.’ Then John asked me if I thought maybe we should rethink that. I said, ‘No, you are my best friend in the world, and if we start dating, we will eventually break up, and then that will ruin our friendship.’ Late in September (of our junior year at RJR), my parents and I went to the beach for the weekend and I told John that I would think about it there. On the way back from the beach, I talked to my mom about it. Ever the wise woman, she said: ‘I don’t know why you don’t just call a spade a spade. As far as I’m concerned you two are dating already.’
“So on the night of Sept. 22, 1980, we took a walk in Reynolda Gardens, sat on the bridge over the waterfall, and decided to change our ‘label,’ ” Flagler recalled. “He’s still my best friend, and I didn’t need to have worried about breaking up and losing that friendship. I remember being so happy and relieved.”
Elizabeth Swaim Redenbaugh, class of 1986, met her husband Jamie at a party in a mutual friend’s backyard just before Elizabeth’s senior year and Jamie’s junior year.
“I was wearing new shoes that made my feet hurt,” Redenbaugh said. “Jamie recognized I was in pain and carried my shoes around for me the entire evening. There was an instant connection.”
One thing the couple did not have was instant communication that today’s teens enjoy.
“Instead of texting, we would write notes to one another in class and pass them off in the halls,” Redenbaugh said. “I still have some of them and they are something I am thankful to have. I’m glad we didn’t have a thread that I had to delete when I didn’t have enough storage on my phone. We also spent hours talking to one another on the phone each day. We didn’t have call waiting or cell phones then, so you would annoy your other family members by tying up the phone line. Wealthier families would often have two phone lines for that reason: one for the kids, one for the adults. Jamie and I didn’t come from families with two phone lines.”
Reynolds Business teacher Mary Bergstone dated her husband David when they were both at Reynolds.
“David and I had an AP music class at the Career Center together,” she said. “I dropped it after about two weeks, but I was also on Pep Board and he was in the band, so we saw each other regularly. We both took Shakespeare and went to see a play with our class in High Point. On the way back I talked him into tutoring me in math. We would meet in the media center after school. Then one day at lunch he asked me to the senior prom. That was our first date. It was awesome.”
Going off to college can be quite a challenge for high school sweethearts. Many couples don’t last through the tumultuous years of college – at least initially.
“We went to college on two different sides of the country,” Mary Bergstone said. “He was at the University of Southern California and I was at UNC-Greensboro. We only made it two years. I think if we had cell phones and computers, we might have lasted.
“We both married others, had kids and got divorced,” Mary Bergstone said. “I moved back to Winston in 2005. I heard that he was separated, so I called his mom to find out if he was actually free, because I didn’t want to come between people trying to work things out. He called me and told me he had been divorced for four years. We went out the next day and picked up where we left off. We were married 51 weeks later.”
Some couples still find ways to make relationships work through the college years. Going to the same school or a school in close proximity to each other helps. Katy Flagler went to UNC-Chapel Hill, while her future husband John Fleer attended Duke.
“Close proximity made it much easier,” Flagler said. “It was also fun during basketball season. Those were the early days of Coach (Mike) Krzyzewski at Duke, and the Duke/Carolina rivalry was just as intense then as it is now. We went to each other’s campuses a lot.”
Redenbaugh had similar sentiments about dating through college.
“I went to Carolina and my husband – then boyfriend – went to N.C. State,” Redenbaugh said. “The only negative about attending different colleges was the phone bill. Back then, a call from Chapel Hill to Raleigh was long distance and we ran up some huge phone bills!”
That communication was a valuable part of a strong relationship that would lead to marriage, though.
“Trust and respect have always been at the foundation of our relationship,” Redenbaugh said. “Maintaining our relationship was an intentional decision on our part. We agreed to have enough respect for one another to not cheat, but to break up first if we were tempted. Thankfully, we never cheated and we never broke up.”
The idea of “love at first sight” is ingrained in modern culture, and some RJR couples said they knew very early on that they had found the person they were going to marry.
“I knew by May of my senior year I was going to marry John,” Morris said. “We had talked about all the important issues, argued over just about everything we could argue about – other than money and children – dealt with life-and-death issues, and been there for each other in good and bad.”
Even the Bergstones had a sense that they were destined to be together, even though they took a longer path to get there.
“I knew we were a good match and enjoyed being together and doing things,” David Bergstone said. “I even wrote a letter and proposed, which I gave to her when I took her sailing on Salem Lake.”
Some couples took things at a slower pace in high school, not thinking about marriage until they were older.
“I just knew I better hold onto him because he was such a good friend to me,” Flagler said. “I think it would put way too much pressure on a high school relationship to spin it too far forward. We were just enjoying each other’s company then. I think if we had thought too far ahead, it would have been damaging. We had no idea that one day we would have three sons and a house and all of that – it would have been too much.”
All four couples had advice for any high school students who think they might have already found “the one.”
“Treat each other well. Listen! Don’t rush,” Karen Morris said. “Things in high school and college are intense. Remember, though, that the person you are with is going to be someone’s wife/husband/mother/father and you want your role in their story to be a good one. If the person you are dating now is not building you up and helping you to be your best version of yourself, recognize that and move on. Your friendships during these years are just as important as your romantic relationships.”
Mary Bergstone advised to “never give up” and allow the relationship to work itself out. Her husband agreed.
“Just know you have to be patient,” David Bergstone said. “We probably would have made a mistake if we got married just out of high school or before finishing college. Although, I’ve known a lot of other people who have also gotten back together with their high school sweetheart after a decade or two. It is easy to get back together with someone you got along so well with and already know a lot about.”
Relationships forged amid the pines are worth the wait and seem capable of standing the test of time.
“We dated eight years prior to getting married because we both wanted to complete college and have me finish law school,” Redenbaugh said. “There is a season for everything.”