Buffalo, NY — 50 years after their divorce, a New York couple is set to take their vows once again, proving that not only is it never too late to find love, but also that sometimes you find it in very unexpected places.
Buffalo couple Lena Henderson and Roland Davis met in Chattanooga, Tennessee back when they were teens. Now 85 years old, Henderson and Davis wed once before, when they were very young. And it wasn’t a quicky marriage either — the pair were together long enough to have four children together.
But in 1964, the couple parted ways. That was 48 years ago, though, and in the nearly five decades they spent apart, their kids say, they never got angry or embittered about their divorce. Renita Chadwick, one of the reuniting couple’s four kids, explains that her parents never sniped at one another through or to the kids in the years following their divorce.
But, Chadwick said, their relationship also did not belie something deeper. She explains:
“The way they would act to each other never indicated there was anything but a friendship between them… My mother never had a harsh or contrary word to say about my dad, and my dad never had anything but loving remarks to make about my mother.”
In the intervening years, Davis remarried. But his second wife died a few months back, and Johnnie May, who is the eldest of the four kids, didn’t like the idea of her dad living alone all the way in Colorado, where he had been living with his now-deceased wife.
Johnnie Mae urged her dad to come back to New York to be by the rest of the family, and he agreed. And as plans were made, he decided to propose to the mother of his children. Henderson explains:
“We were talking on the phone one day and he said, ‘Will you marry me again?…I said ‘well, well… yes.’ …I think we just kept thinking about each other all the time, even though we were so far apart.”
Davis adds:
“You don’t think people are going to get married at this age… We’re just thankful we’ve lived this long and that we’re still here. We have a lot to be thankful for.”
The pair plan to marry this weekend at a church in Buffalo.
