It’s been more than 68 years since West High School sweethearts Carl King and Dorothy Stallings started dating.
After decades apart, they got married Saturday in Waco.
She was a teacher’s daughter, and he ran track, winning the 1942 state championship in the high jump and a scholarship to Texas A&M.
The couple corresponded when King joined the Navy and was shipped out to the Pacific during World War II. When King returned to Texas in 1946, he and Stallings dated for two more years.
But they broke it off. Stallings stayed in the Waco area, where she was a school teacher. King got married and moved to the Gulf Coast, taking a job at a chemical company.
And that could have easily been the end of the story. But it wasn’t.
“When he married, I had to just put it out of my mind,” Stallings said in a phone interview Friday.
They went on with their lives. King, who’s 85, and his wife, Peggy, had four daughters (he now has about 40 grandchildren and great-grandchildren).
Stallings, 84, dated, but never married.
“No one ever measured up to him,” she said. “I knew how much he cared for me.”
When King’s wife died in 2007, Stallings got in touch with King.
“I knew he was hurting and I wrote and told him if there was anything I could do I’d be glad to help, and sometimes it just helps to have someone to talk to,” she said.
King and Stallings started talking on the phone, and she would occasionally write letters.
In Houston for Christmas that year, Stallings said she asked if she could visit him in League City, where he was staying with one of his daughters, but he said he didn’t think it was a good idea.
On Easter in 2008, she asked again.
Stallings recalled telling King “ ‘there are some things I want to say, and I want to say them in person, not over the phone.’ ”
King agreed to the visit.
“We talked for four or five hours and didn’t even take time for lunch,” she said. “We started talking, and we said that there wasn’t a day that passed when we didn’t think of each other.”
Two months later King visited Stallings in Waco.
The newlyweds, Dorothy Stallings and Carl King, kiss Friday after their marriage ceremony at First Baptist Church of Waco.
Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune-Herald“He’s been coming from time to time, and each time he’s stayed longer,” she said. “And then five weeks ago he proposed to me.”
Flash forward to Saturday afternoon. King and Stallings were at First Baptist Church of Waco getting ready to tie the knot. It would be the first wedding for both Stallings and King, who eloped his first time around.
Before the afternoon wedding the couple discussed details with Don Cannata, who was officiating.
Asked if they wanted to do a cake-cutting ceremony after, Stallings said, “No. We’re not young and foolish any more.”
On the length of the wedding itself, King answered, “Short and sweet.”
Cannata honored their wishes. In about 10 minutes rings were on fingers and the couple had been pronounced man and wife.
But there was one slight hiccup.
Cannata nearly forgot to instruct the couple to kiss.
When it became clear King and Stallings might leave the altar without locking lips, the audience was quick to remind the minister.
After nearly seven decades the couple was united, and the bride said she was happy with the timing.
“God works on his own time, and this was a good time for me,” Stallings said. “I’m an only child, but now I’m getting four daughters, three sons-in-law and 16 grandchildren.”
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