Recently, two Michigan high school sweethearts reunited for the first time in 73 years, and they fell in love all over again. Bill Hassinger, 90, and Joanne Blakkan, 92, first hit it off in the late 1940s when they met each other during a school bus ride on the way to North Muskegon High School in Michigan.
The two quickly became acquainted during their daily commute to school, where Blakken began to save a seat for him each day. “I was robbing the cradle,” Blakken said jokingly, who was a junior at the time while Hassinger was a freshman.
As time passed, the young teenagers grew in their attraction to each other. “[We] became more and more attracted to each other and then the next year was serious,” Blakkan said. “And in those days, you called it ‘going steady,’” she added.
Their relationship came to a head when Hassinger accompanied Blakkan to her senior prom in 1949 before she pursued a degree in secretarial science at Michigan State. “That first term, I would come home occasionally on weekends, and we still would go roller skating or whatever,” she said, describing how the two would continue seeing each other despite the distance.
However, things wouldn’t last forever as Hassinger and Blakkan would eventually go their separate ways. “But, gradually, I met the young man who became my husband and he was dating a young lady in high school — and we [she and Hassinger] just went our separate ways,” Blakkan explained.
Hassinger married another woman, after which he enlisted in the United States Army. Following his time in military service, he worked for the state police, moving around the state of Michigan with his wife and three children for nearly 30 years. He remained married to his wife for 68 years before she passed away.
Simultaneously, Blakkan was living a life of her own where she got married while still attending college. She then began her professional life while her husband finished his education. “In later years, I completed my degree at Eastern Michigan University when I was in my 50s, because all three of my children had college degrees by that time, and I felt like I was being left in the dust,” she noted.
Blakkan and her husband also had three children together, where they were happily married for years until died at 57 from a heart attack. “I have been a widow for a long, long time. [I had] no interest in dating or anything,” she stated.
However, Blakkan’s daughter began researching her mother’s former classmates when she discovered that Hassinger lived only 80 miles away. Blakkan’s daughter encouraged her to write Hassinger a letter and reconnect with her old high school sweetheart.
Eventually, the two reconnected and caught up as if no time had passed since they’d last seen each other. “I hadn’t heard from her all these years, and I didn’t know her status or anything. But she was still the same Joanne to me, and I fell for [her] all over again,” Hassinger said. Watch news footage about Hassinger and Blakkan’s reconnection below:
Despite their elderly age, the former prom dates are making the most of the time they are able to spend with one another. “If you feel the love for each other, then just spend time together because life is short, and we realize that now, at our age, we don’t know how much time we have together, but we’re just making the most of every day,” Blakkan said.
Note: The featured image is a screenshot from the embedded video.
"*" indicates required fields