CULLMAN, Ala. – As he walked across the yard to pick her up for the first time, she turned to her aunt and said, “I’m going to marry that man.” Though a bit of a bold statement, it turned out that she was right and by the next day, that young man would, indeed, be her husband. On April 17, that young couple celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary.
Louie Haynes said, “We got married in 1965. We were 17. Ran off and got married the first time I ever went out with her. We ran away to Trenton, Georgia and got married. After we met and talked, we didn’t want to be away from each other anymore.”
Louie went to Cold Springs High School and Rebecca had attended the school for one semester prior to their date. She had moved away but was headed to town. Louie recalled, “Her sister wanted to go with a friend of mine, and she said, “I tell you what, you get me a date with him, I will get you a date with her.’”
Rebecca’s sister did arrange the date for Louie, however, the date between the sister and Louie’s friend did not meet the approval of Rebecca’s grandparents. Despite the other date falling through, Louie proceeded with his date and borrowed a car from Eulane Calvert to pick up Rebecca. “I picked her up from her grandparent’s house in Crane Hill and we stayed out all night and got married the next day.”
Rebecca recalled, “I knew of him, but when he walked across that yard, I knew immediately. I looked at him and thought, that is the best looking man I have ever seen. I was 17 years old. The longer we talked and sat, the more I loved. We got married blindly. We were blind as bats. We were children, absolute children. Whenever my children got our age, I looked at my children and thought, ‘OH LORD!’ If my children dared gotten married at 17 years old, I think I would have just fainted.”
The date was going great and around 11 o’clock that night, Louie looked at his watch and said that he needed to take her home. Neither wanted the date to end. Louie said to her, “Let’s go get married!” Rebecca didn’t think it was possible because of their age.
A friend of Louie’s had gotten married in Trenton, Georgia a few years before. Louie asked him where to go. Parental consent and licenses were not required to get married in Georgia. “I know we didn’t need an ID because I told the guy was 21,” Louie said with a big laugh.
Louie also told his friend Eulane that he would need his car for just a little while longer. Eulane told him just to have the car back by Monday. “Can you believe someone did that? What a good friend!!” Louie said. Rebecca wanted to grab something to wear, so they stopped by her grandparent’s house. Her grandparents were not home so she crawled through the window and grabbed a white Chinese silk dress she had bought in San Francisco. She changed her clothes in a gas station bathroom and off they went!
When the newlyweds returned, the news came as quite a shock. Louie was living with his mother and going to school at the time. He said, “We got back and told them and nobody could really believe us so we showed them the marriage license and everything was ok. OH BOY, it was an adjustment. We survived it all and no one really gave us a chance or anything. They didn’t think we would ever make it, but here we are.”
Rebecca stressed, “We were not irresponsible. We were very responsible 17–year–old kids. That’s what we were. We were children and we got married.” She added, “We did not have sex before we said ‘I do.’ We had none, what-so-ever. No feeling, no touching, no nothing.” They had kissed and she smiled, “that’s when I knew that was it. That was it.”
There was one person that was quite mad about Louie and Rebecca getting married. Louie’s girlfriend was not happy at all. Louie said, “I just drove up and told her I got married. She was shocked.” He added, “Someone might have gotten hurt, but it was my decision and it was the best decision I ever made other than believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. No regrets.”
He continued, “The Lord Jesus Christ came into our lives eight years later and so that’s been our stronghold ever since.”
Rebecca was not in school at the time, but Louie was still in school at Cold Springs. He chose to stay home from school that Monday as he and his bride worked out some things. When he returned to school on Tuesday, Rebecca wrote a note to principal Jack Williams that read, “Please excuse Louie from being absent Monday. He got married-–to me.”
A few months later, a friend of Louie’s got married. He asked Louie and Rebecca to stand with them at the wedding. “It was time for them to leave to go on their honeymoon. They kept hanging around and finally they said, ‘we just don’t want to leave without y’all,’” Louie recalled.
Louie and Rebecca didn’t have the money for a trip and had borrowed money just to be able to get married. Their friends insisted they come along and they all went to Chattanooga and shared a duplex. This would be the closest thing to a honeymoon for the Haynes and just over 9 months later, they would welcome their first son.
Louie finished Cold Springs that spring and started working right away. Rebecca went to college after receiving her GED. Louie retired from Walmart Transportation in Cullman after 23 years and 5 months, where he was a truck driver a majority of the time.
How did they know they wanted to be husband and wife? Louie said, “We couldn’t stop talking to each other. We just LOVED being with each other and it was just back and forth bouncing things off of each other. We just enjoyed each other’s company and we knew it. I didn’t know what love was at that age and at that time, but I knew I didn’t want to be apart from her. She felt the same way. On the way to Trenton, she looked over at me and said, ‘Well, we are going to get married. Do you love me?’ I said, ‘Well, I reckon I do.’ Then we just continually fell in love more and more as we experienced life. She overlooked my weaknesses and I overlooked her’s and here we are. I had to learn to say ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t know how to do that and she was continually drawing me back when I would maybe say something or act or behave in a way that wasn’t really good. She would say, ‘Now wait a minute. You are doing this or you are doing that.’ I just had to face up to the fact that I did have some errors and some blind spots that needed correcting. I was not a perfect person.”
Rebecca said of her husband, “He is the love of my life! God has brought us together through His Providence. I will tell you that. I don’t know what I would have done or where I would have been had the Lord not put us together, because my life was not a happy life until I married this man. I came from a very dysfunctional family and I married him, and my life has been a blessed life since we have gotten married. That was 56 years ago. We have six grandchildren, two great–grandchildren and two sons. It is a blessing to be married to this man.”
The Haynes advice to young couples? Louie said, “Being forgiving and overlooking your spouse’s faults and just dealing with it. I am imperfect and it took me a while to realize that hey, you’ve got your own things going on in your life. You need to be more forgiving of things that the other person does. My wife will tell you that I have shoes scattered everywhere. My wife just overlooks that and lets it go. There are things she does that don’t sit exactly right with me, but that is her. She has her own life and personality, and we have that freedom with each other. She taught me to be a good communicator. I wanted to run from the problem, but she wants to communicate about it. Let’s talk it out.
Rebecca added, “We shepherd in this singles group. We shepherd the singles that are just over the college age. I look at them and I think, you are wasting your lives. We have boys and girls in there and I look at them and they are so picky about who they want to marry. I am thinking, here I married this man and we were raw! He came from one kind of family and I came from another kind of family. I travelled all over everywhere and he had hardly been out of the state of Alabama and Florida. I had been with all kinds of people and he hadn’t been with all kinds of people. Here these two people are put together in a marriage where the wife was supposed to be a submissive part of this marriage. I knew that from the scriptures even though I didn’t know the Lord. Here I was, I wasn’t submissive, but I looked at that and said, ‘I’m supposed to be submissive to this man and I don’t even know how to be that way. We just started life in a raw form and it’s just not normal in today’s society. People think they have to know everything and think they have to measure everything, but you cannot know a person until you are married to them. The Lord meant it to be that way.”
The Haynes now call Birmingham home and attend Briarwood Presbyterian Church where they shepherd young adult singles. To celebrate their 56th anniversary, Louie and Rebecca returned to Cullman for a celebration at the All Steak. He said, “I have eaten there, but my wife has not.” They were joined by their oldest son and Eulane and Dian Calvert.
They also celebrated with close friends Bob and Mary Anne Turnbull Friday night at The Club in Homewood. Bob said of his friends, “They are incredibly happy and both of them love the Lord, and they characterize that in their daily walk. They just model being in love with each other. That’s the bottom–line.”
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