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BELLAIRE • MEMORIAL • RIVER OAKS • TANGLEWOOD • WEST UNIVERSITY

Love Lost and Found

Andria
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Sammie Simons, George Simons

Sammie and George Simons marry for the first time in 1956. Inset photo: They later divorced and, this December, got married again.

George Simons had an announcement to make at Thanksgiving 2012. With all three of his children and their families in attendance, including eight grandchildren ages 15 to 27, as well as Sammie Simons, his former wife and the mother of his children with whom he remained friendly, he had secretly planned to make the announcement after the Texans game.

But as the game progressed into double-overtime, George grew fidgety and asked for the TV remote. He paused the game and stood to speak. With tears in his eyes, he told his family that after 20 years of being single he was getting married. To his first and only wife, their mother and grandmother. Again.

“You hear stories like this,” says George and Sammie’s daughter Laurie, an accountant, “so it’s something I thought could happen. But I wasn’t going to count on it.”

George and Sammie divorced after 31 years of marriage. “We hated to do it, but we had just grown apart,” Sammie, a homemaker, says. “It was amicable. Nobody was bitter.”

George, a retired banker, says, “I made sure she was fine financially and never lacked for anything.”

During their 20 years apart, the couple still got together at family events and holidays, and they even traveled to Europe together a year after they divorced. George and Sammie both dated. “For me, there was nothing serious,” Sammie says. “But George went with a lady for eight years. I was friendly with her because I still wanted to be a family. I even had her and George over for dinner.”

A year or so after George and his friend broke up, he and Sammie started going to dinner more often. Daughter Laurie noticed that they were meeting friends every Saturday at the Bellaire Coffee Shop. “They just seemed to be really good friends,” she says.

One day George called Sammie to tell her he wasn’t feeling well and ask if she would walk his dog. “I went to see him and I took Max for a walk,” Sammie says. “And then I asked, ‘When do you want me to go home?’”

George’s response: “I never want you to go home.” Sammie likes to say that Max the dog brought them back together.

On December 23, 2012, 56 years to the day after their original wedding and 20 years after their divorce, George and Sammie married in front of their Christmas tree. With only George’s sister and her husband, a retired Methodist minister, in attendance, the Simons “just did it again,” as George says. That afternoon, the entire family gathered at their home to celebrate.

Jana Harker, another Simons daughter and a teacher, says the family is “thrilled. There’s so much history, and there are grandkids. It’s such a nice ending to have two people you love together.”

George and Sammie say they feel like newlyweds. Only smarter. “We’re more open and honest. And we’re wiser. We talk about what bothers us.”

John Moffitt, Lucy Richardson

After time apart during college, John Moffitt and Lucy Richardson are engaged to be married this March. (Photo: Kevin Long,www.gulfcoastshots.com)

Lucy Richardson and John Moffitt are just starting out, but their relationship has gone through a similar on-off cycle. The two started dating their freshman year at Bellaire High School. “I saw her getting her freshman ID outside the library at Cardinal Camp and something hit me like a lightning bolt,” John says. For the next four years, the two were the perfect high school couple. As seniors, the school newspaper profiled them as sweethearts. Months later, Lucy and John broke up.

“We were going to college and just wanted to have the whole experience and develop our own identities,” Lucy says. “If things were meant to be, we knew we’d find our way back to each other.”

They kept in touch for a couple of years while Lucy was at TCU and John at LSU, then they stopped, going a year and a half without talking. “We both got back to Houston in 2010, and we went to dinner, and the rest is history,” Lucy says.

Lucy, who works in the development office at MD Anderson Cancer Center, and John, a commercial lender at Amegy Bank, are engaged to be married this March. In a nod to their meeting spot at the Bellaire High School library, they’ll wed at the Julia Ideson Library. And a quartet of Bellaire students will play during the cocktail hour.

“I’m grateful that we did it the way we did,” John says. “It was the right thing. The toughest part was being apart, but now we know ourselves better.”

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