A wedding ceremony outdoors with columns in the background. A middle-aged man wearing a light-colored suit jacket, patterned tie, and lei holds what appears to be a book or document. An older adult female wears glasses, a white lace dress with floral embellishments, and a pearl necklace. 3:11
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They met in college and married 49 years later

Janice Rude was serving lunch in the Occidental College cafeteria when she noticed Prentiss Willson. Soon he was a regular, and not for the food. more

“She was much too beautiful for me,” Prentiss says, but she was just as eager to see him. At Thanksgiving he went home for four days, which, as Janice puts it, was going to be trouble. So she drove to his family's house in Santa Maria, about 150 miles away, and showed up without warning. “That was bold for me,” she says.

The next day he showed her around town. Somewhere along the way they kissed and held hands, and from then on they knew they had to be married. Their engagement notice ran in the local paper.

Prentiss went to her father's house for dinner with no idea what the man would think of him. Then her father called Janice at her dorm one night. “You stop seeing that boy or I'll cut off your tuition.”

Janice needed that degree, so she ended it. “I felt terrible about the breakup itself,” she says. “I thought of him, I would say, almost all the time.”

An older woman with glasses, earrings and a necklace sits indoors and looks ahead. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Janice ended the engagement to stay in school, but she thought of Prentiss almost all the time.

Years went by. When Prentiss's mother died, he went through her papers and found their engagement notice, which she had kept all that time. When Janice's mother died, Janice found one tucked in her mother's wallet, where it had been for more than 30 years. The two mothers had never met.

To them, it was a sign they were supposed to be together. Both were single by then, and they met for brunch at the Cliff House in San Francisco. She was late, as she always is, and he was early, as he always is. When she arrived, he told her those were beautiful pants, the exact color of the outfit she wore at Thanksgiving dinner all those years before.

A wedding ceremony outdoors with columns in the background. A middle-aged man wearing a light-colored suit jacket, patterned tie, and lei holds what appears to be a book or document. An older adult female wears glasses, a white lace dress with floral embellishments, and a pearl necklace. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Janice Rude was serving lunch in the Occidental College cafeteria when she noticed Prentiss Willson.

“I was surprised he remembered,” Janice says. It was time, they decided, to fix what had gone wrong so long ago. They married at Occidental College, in a courtyard that belongs to the student union and the dining hall, which felt right for two people who met over lunch.

Their verdict on married life is short. “We are so happy. Our marriage is perfect, and of course we have very few years now to live it, but it will be perfect.”

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