Though they broke up in 1974, this Oklahoma couple is rekindling love 50 years later: 'I never stopped loving her'
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Tom and Theresa's first date in Chickasha almost never happened.
Still, they became a couple, but marriage was off the menu, thanks to Theresa’s dad.
Finally, Tom’s heart broke when their relationship ended with a note left on his car windshield on a winter day.
“It was cold,” Tom said, not in reference to the weather.
Their breakup lasted decades. Over the years, Theresa moved to Texas, graduated from West Texas A&M and became a pre-K teacher in Amarillo. She married twice, divorced once and was widowed, and had four children and 11 grandchildren.
Meanwhile, Tom went to Moore-Norman Tech Center and became the general manager of a building products company in Oklahoma City. He married and divorced twice, and had two daughters, but one died at 16 with leukemia.
But then, remarkably, Tom and Theresa found each other again.
It started last year with a social media search by Tom and an old-school inquiry from Theresa — a letter in the mail.
Over a cup of coffee at Tom’s kitchen table on a damp January morning in Norman, Tom and Theresa told their story.
Their story pivoted on a word. "Yes."
Their story promises two more words. "I do."
'Gonna steal that girl'
The beginning was 1972: when Roberta Flack’s "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" topped the music charts, moviegoers made “The Godfather” the top-grossing film, and Americans tuned in each week to watch Archie and Meathead bicker on “All in the Family.”
Just out of high school, Tom Miller smoked Marlboro cigarettes and drove a 1965 red Ford Galaxie 500 around Chickasha.
One day, he stopped in at a diner near a Humpty Dumpty grocery store.
Theresa, whose last name at the time was Belcher, worked at the diner.
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Tom recalled seeing her in high school, but he couldn’t remember her name. He summoned the courage to try to talk to her.
“I went to the diner, and I didn't see her, but I saw her best friend who worked there,” Tom said. “I said ‘There's a little girl with long black hair who works here and what's her name?’ She said, ‘Oh, that's Theresa. She's in the back. I'll get her.’ And she went back to get Theresa.”
And with that brief exchange, Tom had emptied his can of courage.
“I just chickened out,” he said. “I just. Oh my God, man. All of a sudden, my mouth went dry. I didn't know what to say. And I turned around, left, and (her friend) hollered ‘Wait a minute, here she comes. Here she comes.’ And I just kept on truckin’.”
Before he left the diner, Theresa’s friend had told him Theresa’s last name.
“I went home, got the phone book, and well, there just aren't very many Belchers in Chickasha,” Tom said. “It was not rocket science to narrow down her phone number. And I gave her a call and said something to the effect of ‘You probably don't know me, but my name's Tom Miller,’ and she did know me. And we made a date to go out to a drive-in and get a Coke.”
The date was at Max’s Dari-Valley Drive-In. Theresa had to be home by 11 p.m. She was finishing her senior year in high school.
She didn’t date much. Maybe a couple of guys, she recalled.
“When I met Tom, I liked him a whole lot,” Theresa said. “His personality. He was funny like he still is, and just an all-around nice guy. And I thought he was good-looking. I thought he was handsome.”
Tom thought one of the guys Theresa dated was her boyfriend.
“They'd gone out a few times and I remember thinking to myself that I'd like to go out with that girl,” Tom said. “'I’m gonna steal that girl away from him.'”
The wrong side of the tracks
Tom and Theresa continued to date as she finished high school and then when both attended the University of Oklahoma.
Tom was never allowed at Theresa’s home.
“Well, I hate to say this,” Theresa said, laughing. “(My dad) said he was from the wrong side of the tracks. But he wasn't a bad guy.”
Tom smiled.
“I wasn’t good enough for his daughter,” he said. “I get that.”
Their friends saw a couple destined for life together.
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“They were such a happy, fun couple,” Patti McCarty, Theresa's college roommate, said by phone. “Sometimes you meet a couple, and it’s just like you can see they’re in love and they’re such a great combination of personalities. Theresa was always crazy about Tom and he about her.”
But a couple of years into their courtship, the pressure from her disapproving father proved too much for Theresa.
Even Tom thought they were too young at the time to get married.
On New Year’s Eve in 1974, he found a note on his windshield in the parking lot outside his new job. To avoid the pain of a face-to-face breakup, Theresa wrote him goodbye.
“I had gotten a job at a mental institution,” Tom said. “It was my first day of orientation.”
Theresa not only gave up Tom. She gave up her teaching and accounting studies at OU.
“I didn't graduate at that point,” Theresa said. “I got married twice ... but Tom, I had thought about him all through the years, always on his birthday. Every time I came to Norman to visit my family, I wondered what he was doing, who he was with. How is he doing?”
Tom, who left OU, as well, had some of the same thoughts.
“Through my whole life, I've often wondered, what if?” he said. “Could've, would've, should've. What if we had married instead, you know?”
'I've never stopped loving her'
Over the years, Theresa looked Tom up on the internet. She was recently widowed.
“I thought, well, the time was right, nothing's holding me back now,” Theresa said. “And I went for it. I had been looking, but I couldn't tell if there was a lady living with him. That's what kind of was bothering me and I thought, ‘I don't want to bust in on this lady or whatever kind of relationships he was having.’”
So on July 29 from Amarillo where she lives, Theresa mailed a card to a friend of Tom's oldest brother, Jerry, in Norman. She asked him about Tom.
That same day, Tom was at home, wondering about Theresa.
“I've never done a search for anybody in my life, but for some reason on that Saturday evening I was sitting there at my computer, and I just couldn't get her out of my head,” Tom said. “I kept thinking about her, and I remembered that my brother, when he did some (home improvement) work for her aunt, made mention to me that she lived in Amarillo.”
Tom typed Theresa’s name into a social media app, and she came up on the screen. He sent her a message inquiring if she was the Theresa Belcher who once lived in Chickasha.
Theresa received the message, but she didn't know it came from Tom. Why? Because her long-ago boyfriend’s trademark humor backfired.
Wanting to guard his own privacy, Tom had used a fake name he thought was funny. JoeBilly Bob.
“Well, of course, she doesn't know who JoeBilly Bob is, so she just deletes it,” Tom said.
Kind of. As Theresa tells it, she deleted “JoeBilly Bob’s” friend request, but his message remained.
Meanwhile, Tom's brother wrote her back. She got his letter on Aug. 4. They ended up talking on the phone. Theresa gave Jerry her phone number in case Tom wanted to call her.
“Well, duh,” Tom said. “I've never stopped loving her, never forgot her. ... I called her on like August 6th. I think it was a Sunday evening, and we talked from like at night 'til 3 o’clock in the morning. I had to put my phone on the recharger three times.”
'A 50-year love story'
A few days after they spoke on the phone, Theresa drove up from Amarillo to Norman to meet Tom. It was in a Homeland parking lot. When Theresa pulled up, Tom was sitting on the tailgate of his truck, smoking a cigarette.
“As I saw her through the windshield, I recognized her instantly,” Tom said. “She hadn't changed one bit. Her hair's not jet black anymore, but she hasn't changed.”
“It was pretty epic,” Theresa said. “More emotional when we first got together, and thinking about all the time that has passed ... and then I really knew it was him when he hugged me. I mean, it was like, I remember how I felt. It was just everything was still familiar.”
The two of them started going steady again, visiting each other in Texas and Oklahoma.
And then on a bright fall morning in Norman, Tom invited Theresa to take a walk around a local duck pond that was a favorite spot of theirs when they were young.
There he asked her to stand on a bridge so he could take photographs of her.
“As I'm walking back up on her, I pulled the ring out of my pocket,” Tom said. “I had it in my hand and I said, ‘you know, I should have done this 49 years ago.’ And I dropped down on one knee and held the ring up and said, ‘would you?’ And after she got done crying, then she said ‘yes.’”
The marriage is scheduled in June after Theresa retires. He will be 70. She will be 69.
Friends said watching the romance renewed is something out of a Hallmark movie. Among them is Gayla Robison, Theresa's best friend when they were younger, the girl at the Chickasha diner who asked Tom to wait for Theresa to come out.
“I'm so excited how they finally made it back to each other,” Robison said. “We said it was a 50-year love story in the making.”
Tom and Theresa agree they weren’t ready to marry each other so young. Perhaps God had other plans for their lives. Definitely for their reunion, they say.
“We did have to mature a lot,” Theresa said. “The love and the attraction didn't go away, even after 50 years.”
“It's like we just fit you know?” Tom said. “Both of our senses of humor just mesh. And I enjoy being around her so much, unlike any relationship I've ever been in. We have fun and we genuinely enjoy just being together. I think that you're going to know true love when it hits. And don't let anybody else sway you from what you really want.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma couple rekindles love after 50 years apart
