After 61 Years, One More Chance

The day she was to marry Dick MacDonald in 1929, 18-year-old Grace A. Hembree put on a pink flapper dress and took a streetcar to meet her fiance at the minister’s house.

After a brief ceremony, the newlyweds drank coffee. It was during Prohibition and the couple could not toast their wedding with champagne.

Sixty-four years after she married him--and 61 years after the MacDonalds divorced and married others--81-year-old Grace A. Sims married Dick MacDonald, 82, a second time in Pacific Palisades.

The wedding party this time had gray coifs unlike their brunette haircuts of the Roaring ‘20s. The bride, dressed in peach lace, tired during the 10-minute ceremony and professed a need to sit shortly after her wedding kiss. MacDonald, now legally blind, squinted at his new marriage license and smiled at the words he could not read.

Long since having given up alcohol, the couple drank to their happiness with clear, sparkling grape juice.

“I never really quit loving him,” she says. “It’s like we’ve never been apart.”

*

The two met in 1924, at Alexander Hamilton Junior High in Wichita, Kan., when she was 13 and he was 14. She recalls wangling an introduction. He remembers calling her home every night at exactly 5:30 p.m.

“It was one of these puppy things,” Dick MacDonald says. “I guess it turned into something un-puppy.”

Shortly after they were married in Wichita, the MacDonalds moved to Los Angeles. They took an apartment downtown on 14th Street near San Pedro, so Dick MacDonald--an electrician by training--could walk to work at the Whitlock Metered Mailing Co. on 14th.

“It was not especially an upgrade area,” she says. “It was the depth of the Depression, you took what you could afford.” Three months later, MacDonald came to work and found the place boarded up.

By 1932, the stresses of the times were wearing on the couple. MacDonald found work, got laid off, and then found work again. They tried desperately to have children.

When a doctor told them that they had a genetic incompatibility and would not be able to have a family together, the young couple had little choice but to accept the doctor’s word and their failed efforts.

“We began to drift apart a little bit and we decided to go our own ways,” Dick MacDonald says. “It seemed to us that we had a rather bleak future together because we couldn’t have children. In those days you didn’t have marriage counselors.” He moved out in the summer of 1932.

A year after their divorce--the legal waiting period then for remarriage--MacDonald married Thelma Paddock, a widow with two daughters. They had two daughters and were married 38 years when Paddock died of cancer in 1971.

Grace married Jerome Sims in 1933 and had three daughters. At her new family’s most desperate point during the Depression, Sims sold her first wedding ring for food. (“And you did the right thing,” MacDonald reassures her now.)

Sims buried her husband in 1948 and began working in the medical records department of a local hospital. She did not remarry for 45 years.

*

Over the years, Grace Sims would hear “Just One More Chance” by Bing Crosby and think about her first marriage. “It was the song that made me think of him,” she says. “I guess I hoped I would have one more chance to see him.

“I wondered where he was and how he was doing and how many kids he had. I knew he was in the same phone book I was because I checked.”

She decided not to contact him, she says, because she did not want to intrude in his new life. The two did not meet face-to-face again until 1980, at a mutual friend’s hospital bedside. Sims asked the friend, who had been best man at their wedding, when MacDonald would visit and planned her “accidental” meeting.

Her palms began to sweat when he walked into the room. “I knew it had to be him, but I was surprised at how gray he was.”

They talked for hours that day, put their ghosts to rest, laughed at old memories and forgave each other for the marriage that did not work.

“You’ve heard the term ‘soul mate’? “ Sims asks. “I really think some people are meant to be together. Circumstances may not always allow it, but some couples are just meant.”

MacDonald, who had married again in 1972, encouraged Sims to attend meetings of a philosophical society with him and the two began a friendship over cups of coffee at the society’s monthly meetings.

“I believe we were falling in love,” MacDonald says, smiling at his wife. “But I had a deep sense of loyalty and would take no steps to end my marriage. There were times I wished the whole situation was a little bit different.”

Three months after his third wife died in 1993, MacDonald again proposed to his first wife. Dick MacDonald and Grace Sims were married in a private ceremony in her Pacific Palisades trailer home on July 24.

“She was no longer the Grace Hembree I married in 1929, nor was I the Dick MacDonald she married in 1929,” MacDonald says. “It meant that we have both gone through a normal maturing process.

“Our marriage in 1929 was just a rehearsal. This one now is the real thing.”