In August 1949, Eddie Goodwin left the town of Scottsville and a farewell message with his favorite girl to become a pastor 1,400 miles away in Waco, Texas.

“I was going back to my second year of Baylor University and I wrote in Myrtle’s yearbook that someday maybe we’d be back together. I didn’t get home except summer time and distance doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder. That was the last time we dated. I wrote to her, but correspondence kind of dwindled,” he says. “There wasn’t no hard feelings just heartbreak, but it happens.”

“The distance was too much for us,” says Myrtle, known as “Bubbles” by Scottsville locals. As she remembers it, the high school romance was a lot of fun.

“He always had a job—worked at Bruce’s Drug Store, Beals Variety Store, delivered the Richmond-Times Dispatch, worked on the farm, different things like that. Way back then it was wonderful. We were in love.”

Still, after several years of dating off and on, “Eddie was going to be a minister, and at that time I didn’t know if I wanted to be a minister’s wife. We sort of drifted apart.”

Bubbles married Lewis Rhodes and remained in Scottsville. Eddie met a lovely girl named Joy while living in Texas; they married and later made a home together in Missouri.

Now and then, Bubbles would ask their mutual friend Bobby Spencer how her former beau Ed Goodwin was doing. “Every Oct. 22 I thought about him on his birthday and wondered how he was.”

Likewise, Eddie still remembered the girl whose initials were carved with his in a column at the back of Scottsville Baptist Church, where he was later ordained.

Spencer was ordained in the same church. While writing the history of Scottsville Baptist Church last year for its 170th anniversary he decided to contact Goodwin.

“I wanted him to know we were celebrating and invite him to come if he could.”

Goodwin declined, but in his response letter he mentioned Myrtle Rhodes.

“He reminisced about his time in Scottsville, having gone to Scottsville High School and all of that and asked about her particularly, so when I answered his letter I told him that ‘of course I knew Bubbles,’” Spencer says.

“Then he showed up here Dec. 5 (2010) for the service at our church! I said ‘Well, I have just got to get you and Myrtle together,’ so when she came out of her Sunday school classroom I said, ‘Bubbles there’s someone here that I think you ought to see.’”

“When I first saw him I got so excited, I really did,” Bubbles says.

Eddie did, too.

“It’s almost unreal. We hadn’t even communicated in 61 years—it was almost unreal, but very real, and brings back the memories,” he says.

Bubbles learned that Eddie had lost his wife of 56 years over two years earlier “and he came to Scottsville to find me.” Her marriage to Lewis E. Rhodes had ended when he passed away in 2001 after “50 wonderful years.”

“[Bubbles] came back and hugged me, and when [the celebration] was over I leaned over and told her to give me her address and I would write her.”

Eddie kept his promise to stay in touch, and the pair talked on the phone every night “for at least an hour and a half or two hours. He would ask me about things, about family and about Scottsville,”

Bubbles says. “A lot of people didn’t know we were talking and reliving our life over the phone. It made me feel good. It would make my heart flutter. Both of us used to blush. I could feel it.”

High school sweethearts Myrtle and Eddie married in Missouri on March 25 of this year. “At 80 years old you don’t have much time, so that’s why I came to Missouri to get him,” she says. “At 80 years old, you can’t fool around. ...or that’s another story,” says Eddie, who claims he doesn’t know how 80 feels yet. “We have as much fun as we did at 18.”

“I’ve played a lot of roles in my life, and now I’ve played matchmaker,” says Spencer, who recently worked with the Scottsville Senior Center to give the happy couple a proper wedding reception here in Virginia.

Now that they are married, Bubbles shares a word of advice for anyone else who gets this kind of opportunity: “Do it,” she says. “Don’t care, just do it.”