Summer Romance Rekindled After a 53-Year Separation

He waited 53 years between dates with her, but Jim Lawson finally married Eleanor Adamson.

The Glendale couple, each 72, first met in the summer of 1930 at Idyllwild resort in the San Jacinto Mountains west of Palm Springs. They were 16.

They danced, listened to records and ran about with girlfriends and boyfriends, but when the vacation ended, Jim went home to Riverside and Eleanor returned to Glendale.

Jim hitchhiked in several times to see her. They sat in her living room and listened to records in the single-story, tile-roofed, Spanish-style home where Eleanor lived with her parents and where Jim and Eleanor live now.

Late on those Saturday nights, Jim would tell Eleanor and her mother that he was going to a hotel. But he had no money and would take a streetcar to an all-night movie in Los Angeles and nap until daylight.

Difficult Journeys

Feeling sleepy on Sunday morning, he would stick out his thumb again and return to Riverside.

The three-hour trips were difficult. It was hard to get rides and he had to do a lot of walking. So Jim stopped going. But he never completely forgot Eleanor. And Eleanor never completely forgot him.

Eleanor went to UCLA and married in 1936. Her husband joined the Foreign Service and later worked for the Exxon Corp. purchasing foreign properties.

Over a 30-year period she lived in Barcelona, Caracas, Paris, Moscow, Seoul, Bombay and in a Sumatra jungle reachable only by airplane.

Her husband died in 1965. She remarried and was divorced in 1974, the same year she moved back into the family home when her mother became ill. She remained there after her mother died in 1976.

Jim joined the Bank of America and stayed 42 years, retiring in 1979 as the Reseda branch manager.

When Peggy, his wife of 45 years, died of cancer in 1982, he felt devastated.

He felt especially lonely at mealtime. “I hate eating alone,” he said. “So I’d go out to some restaurant, go in the parking lot, change my mind, and go back home and heat something in the microwave.”

He said he attended a party in Glendale a year later and, although he had not seen or talked to Eleanor since 1930, he asked an old friend if he knew her.

“Sure. In fact I just saw her the other day,” the friend said.

“And I said, ‘Well, how’d she look?’ ” Lawson recalled.

“Well, she looked great,” the friend said.

“So I was very interested right away, you know,” Lawson said.

A few weeks later another friend who had heard the conversation called Jim and gave him Eleanor’s phone number.

‘Always Stuck With Me’

“I’ve had a lot of girlfriends like most guys have had in their lifetime,” Jim said recently trying to explain his interest.

“And you love ‘em and leave ‘em and you forget ‘em. But it just seemed with Eleanor it always stuck with me. She was very attractive.”

The bespectacled widower was alone in his Canoga Park home when he got the phone number and “I couldn’t get up the courage to call her. Because I was afraid she wouldn’t remember me. And this and that. So I fixed myself about two martinis to get up the courage, and then I called her.

“And she didn’t remember my name. But as soon as I told her we met in Idyllwild, then she remembered me, but she didn’t remember my name.”

“I said I had a lot of pictures of the summer at Idyllwild,” Eleanor said. “And he said, ‘Well, get the pictures.’ ”

“So she got the pictures and brought them out,” Jim said. “And I had the pictures too. And I said, ‘See us two on the end there?’ Then she remembered.”

Jim asked her to dinner. A surprised Eleanor said yes. After that, things happened fast.

“We went out with this other couple at least once a week,” Eleanor said. “Then he’d come over and see me almost every other day. He called me two or three times a day.”

Jim changed his phone service so he could get a cheaper rate from his Canoga Park home to Glendale.

“I was alone in the house and it was therapy to have someone to talk to,” he said. “So I’d call her up every night and talk for an hour or two. I didn’t know what to talk to her about but it helped me.

“I really needed someone,” he said. “I’m not a loner. I was in a pretty depressive state, and the minute we got reacquainted it just seemed to completely disappear and I felt great.”

Two years later, in March, 1985, they married. Jim moved into Eleanor’s pink, two-bedroom home on a tree-lined street.

(A New York psychiatrist, Clifford J. Sager, said it’s not uncommon for friends to reunite after years apart, but that the Lawsons’ 53-year separation is the “longest I know of, offhand.”

(The co-author of a textbook on “Treating the Remarried Family,” Sager said that redeveloped relationships can be more comfortable than new ones and that when older people split up, it’s common “to think of people you’ve seen around or dated and to wonder about their availability.”)

Lawson said that when he attended the Glendale party, he was not thinking of Eleanor and asked about her only by chance. He is glad the whim struck.

When they married, the award-winning amateur photographer kept his Canoga Park house because he didn’t want to give up the complete darkroom he had built there. His daughter told him the unused house had become the most expensive darkroom in the San Fernando Valley.

But a few weeks ago he sold it and he and Eleanor were moving Jim’s furniture to her house. In a back bedroom they placed a large computerized organ so Jim could practice another of his hobbies in place of photography.

The organ rests next to a tall, hand-carved wood screen and an ornate brass table that Eleanor brought back from India and rosewood tables she sent home from China.

Family Is Nearby

Eleanor’s son, La Crescenta attorney Thomas R. Cory, and Jim’s daughter, Newberry Park office manager Linda Holzer, are nearby, along with three grandchildren.

“We seem to have a lot in common,” Eleanor said sitting near Jim in their high-ceilinged living room.

“He’s good company and he makes me feel good. And I feel . . . relaxed and happy. Now that he’s retired, we’re together almost all the time and I’m never bored.”

“When I saw her, we remembered the old days and it just seemed after awhile like we’d always been together,” Jim said.