Weatherford

Parker County Couple Celebrates 74 Years Together

Opal and Reuben Hager of Parker County recently celebrated their 74th anniversary. She's in a nursing home. Yet even with social distancing keeping them apart, their love endures.
Sheila Stanton

A couple in Parker County is showing us how love endures in sickness, in health and in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Opal and Reuben Hager are apart. She lives in a nursing home in Willow Park that’s off-limits to visitors during the coronavirus pandemic. Her husband lives with one of their daughters in Weatherford.

Yet there was no way Rueben was going to miss their 74th wedding anniversary.

The two have been part of each other's lives since 1945.

Sheila Stanton
Opal and Reuben Hager met in 1945 as teenagers. They were married six months later and recently celebrated their 74th wedding anniversary.

Daughter Sheila Stanton says they met at “my dad’s 16th birthday party. They married April 1946. My dad was 16 and my mom was 19.”

They went on to have five children, 10 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren.

Stanton says it's been hard on her parents to be apart and not see each other.

“Mother has been in a hospital or nursing home since November of 2017. We always celebrated holidays at the nursing home with family and friends. This is the first time we could not properly celebrate Easter or their anniversary,” Stanton wrote in an email to NBC 5.

Still, on Monday, April 20, Reuben was there at the nursing home with a sign that read “Happy 74th Anniversary,” blue and gold balloons and roses for his best gal.

Stanton says the marriage has lasted more than seven decades based primarily on one big rule, “Never go to bed mad,” she wrote. Although, “sometimes it was a long night,” she joked. And even now with social distancing and a glass door or window between them now, their love endures.

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