Bonus Chapter

Charlotte and John Henderson

MARRIED IN 1939

“Charlotte was kind of shy, so she didn’t want a big wedding. I remember the day as though it were yesterday. I had a new 1936 Model Ford.”

We honestly thought we were done.

It was early December 2019, and we were on the final lap of our adventure in marriage journalism. All of our interviews had been conducted, and we were just putting the final touches on our manuscript, when we boarded a flight for a fast trip to the west coast for a St. Jude event.

Somewhere over the Midwest, Marlo received an email on her iPhone. She read it carefully and turned to Phil.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she whispered, “but Guinness World Records has found the oldest living married couple. And they’ve been married for eighty years.”

“Eighty years?” Phil said. “How old are they?”

“Their combined age is almost 212,” Marlo responded. “Their names are Charlotte and John Henderson, and they live in Austin, Texas. What a shame we didn’t know about them sooner.”

We went back to our reading, and then seconds later turned to each other again.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Marlo said.

“What a great way to end our book,” Phil said. “Let’s make a little side trip to Texas on our way home.”

And that’s how we found ourselves, two days later, at Longhorn Village, a quiet and lovely retirement community in Texas Hill Country, just eleven miles northwest of Austin.

The Hendersons’ residence is an assisted-living facility tucked between two lakes and surrounded by lush greenery. Nestled at the end of a long driveway, it looks like a charming southern hotel; and the large lobby was filled with fine furniture and, at this time of year, festive Christmas decor.

As it turns out, we weren’t just visitors to Longhorn—we were its two newest residents. That’s because, when we asked the proprietor where in town we could stay for the evening, she told us—with perfect Texas hospitality—“Well, don’t waste your money on some fancy hotel. Bring your bags in and be our guests!”

It was 3 a.m. when we arrived (we seem to be magnets for plane delays), so we were very happy to accept the gracious invitation and settle in for the night. In the morning, we invited Charlotte and John into our roomy two-bedroom suite, which overlooked the beautiful property.

The couple offered warm handshakes.

“Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Henderson,” we said respectfully. “We’re so pleased to meet you,”

“You can call me John,” John said.

“You can call me Charlotte,” Charlotte echoed.

Charlotte was in a wheelchair that was pushed by an attendant—and why shouldn’t she be? She took her first steps just around the time Babe Ruth hit his first career home run—she’s earned the right to put her feet up.

John is more ambulatory than his wife; but for longer distances, he uses wheels, too. The only difference is that his chair was motorized, and he operated it with youthful exuberance. That’s fitting, given that motor vehicles have always been a part of this man’s life. In fact, a used car was what brought this couple together.

Houston, Texas; December 22, 1939

It was the early 1930s when John plunked down $26 for a 1925 Dodge Roadster. The car was stylish and dark green, which John remembers vividly.

“I painted it myself,” he told us. “I bought a quart of green paint at Western Auto, then got a brush, and I brushed that whole thing green,” John voice is surprisingly boyish for a man of 107. He speaks slowly, to be sure, but his words are charmingly accented with a twang that’s as thick as a barbecued Texas rib eye.

“I loved that little Roadster,” recalled Charlotte, 105, obviously relishing the sweet memory. “It was most unusual for a boy to have a car.”

“That’s right,” John confirmed. “I was one of, I would say, a hundred students who had an automobile.”

“Did it have rumble seats in the back?” Phil asked.

“No, no,” John said, “no rumble seats. It was just a two-seater with soft leather upholstery that was a little bit before its time. It was actually the last Dodge car built with the old Dodge shift. Low was up here, second was back here, high was up there,” he added, reflexively reaching out for a stick shift that was long gone.

John told us that he enjoyed cruising around the University of Texas campus, where he was a student and football star. Indeed, today he is the oldest living former UT football letterman. He played guard, both offense and defense, and he still faithfully roots for his team, attending at least one Longhorn game every season.

“In those days I could park anywhere on the campus I wanted to,” he recalled. “I’d climb into the car, pick Charlotte up, drop her off at her class, and then head to mine.”

It was in one of those classrooms that John first had the pleasure of meeting the young and pretty Charlotte Curtis, an Iowa native who had relocated to Texas with her family after the death of her father. Charlotte and John were in the same zoology class; and, lucky for them, the alphabetically assigned seating in the lecture hall put the H’s behind the C’s, placing Charlotte’s desk directly in front of John’s.

CHARLOTTE: He would look over my shoulder and say something to me, so that’s how we got acquainted.

MARLO: It sounds like you were fated to be together. Did you immediately find him cute? I mean, he was this handsome football star . . .

CHARLOTTE: Handsome? Well, he might not be perfectly handsome, but he was fine for me.

JOHN: I don’t know, I saw myself on TV the other day, and I didn’t think I looked that old.

PHIL: What about you, John? Were you swept off your feet when your first laid eyes on Charlotte?

JOHN: Well, yeah, she was the closest to me in class, and she was a good-looking chick, too. Back in those days, the girls all wore high-heeled shoes—and didn’t you wear a hat?

CHARLOTTE: Sometimes we wore hats, yes. And dresses. Just completely different then from the way it is now.

MARLO: So you began dating. Where would you go?

JOHN: You know, somebody recently asked me what we did on our first date, and I didn’t have the slightest idea.

CHARLOTTE: Well, he liked to dance. He didn’t do anything fancy—you know, twirling or things like that. But I didn’t either, so it worked out perfectly.

JOHN: I liked to foxtrot.

CHARLOTTE: That’s right, the foxtrot.

MARLO: Did you date other boys, too, Charlotte, or just—

CHARLOTTE: No, no. Only John.

MARLO: And what about you, John?

JOHN: Charlotte was the only one I had a date with. But, as a matter of fact, I think my roommate had a date with Charlotte before I did. Hubbell. Didn’t you have a date with Hubbell?

CHARLOTTE: I didn’t have a date with Hubbell. You always thought I did, but I never had a date with him. I knew Hubbell and I liked him, but never did we have a date.

JOHN: Well, I don’t know. Hubbell and Fred Beasley and I roomed together. And I think maybe Hubbell told me that he had a date with Charlotte.

PHIL: I guess even after eighty years, some things don’t get resolved.

John was born in 1912, the same year the Titanic set sail. World War I hadn’t yet started, and women didn’t have the right to vote. After graduating high school, John came to Austin to attend college. He lived in a rooming house across the street from a gymnasium and next door to a family that kept chickens and a cow in their backyard.

“Chickens on one side and a gymnasium on the other,” John said with a broad Texas grin. “Imagine that!”

By the time Charlotte met John, she’d already lived through more than her fair share of tragedy. In addition to losing her father at a young age, her sister Larraine’s husband, Ernest, had died in a terrifying way. He was an army pilot, and in December 1929, he was on a routine flight from Georgia to Alabama with three other airmen when their plane caught fire. The crew made an emergency decision to evacuate the burning aircraft—at five hundred feet. While the three other men survived the jump, Ernest’s parachute failed to open and he died on impact. He left behind Charlotte’s sister and an infant daughter.

Charlotte and John Henderson, married eighty years, set the Guinness World Record as the oldest living married couple on August 28, 2019, with an aggregate age of 211 years and 175 days.

As John recounted the story, Charlotte watched him attentively. “I always like to hear him talk,” she said.

“But anyway,” John continued, “that’s how Charlotte’s family got here to Texas, and I think she liked me pretty well. Her mother always called me Hendy. She knew we were going to do well in our later life, and sure enough it turned out that way.”

Despite his future mother-in-law’s blessing, however, it would take a while for wedding bells to toll.

“The whole reason we waited so long to get married is because it took me five years to talk her into it,” John revealed.

“Really?” Marlo said. “Why, Charlotte? At that time, most mothers were pushing their daughters to marry. Wasn’t yours?”

“No,” Charlotte said. “She wanted me to have an education, and that was just perfect for me. We lived in a good area that was convenient for me—I walked to school. So, no, she didn’t mind that I waited until I was ready.”

Money was also an issue for Charlotte and John. They met in 1934, when the Great Depression was in full swing, and gangsters like John Dillinger wreaked havoc across the nation. It was a volatile, desperate time in America, with nationwide unemployment higher than 20 percent.

“Everybody was in the same boat,” John remembered. “It was the Depression, and everyone we knew didn’t have much of anything. That was just the way it was, so we got along fine. We just took life one step at a time.”

So after graduation, the couple decided to hold off on the nuptials and “put a little money in the bank,” as John put it. He coached high school football and made a profit selling the Dodge Roadster for $75, while Charlotte worked as a schoolteacher and lived with her family.

The couple finally tied the knot by eloping to Houston on December 22, 1939. John was twenty-seven, Charlotte was twenty-five. They had a small ceremony with just two witnesses.

“Charlotte was kind of shy,” John noted, “so she didn’t want a big wedding. One of the witnesses was the son of the minister who married us, and the other was a friend of Charlotte’s brother from Austin. I remember the day as though it were yesterday. I had a new 1936 Model Ford and it was black. Henry Ford said he would sell you a car in any color you wanted, as long as it was black.”

“I read about that once,” Phil said with a laugh. “That was the joke in the ad. So it sounds to me like pretty much every chapter of your life is marked by some automobile or another.”

“Yup,” John said proudly. “As a matter of fact, I had a Model T Ford when I was in high school. So I’ve had a jalopy of some kind from the time I could drive until today.”

The couple honeymooned in San Antonio, staying at the St. Anthony, a luxury hotel known for its elegant mahogany furnishings and telephones in every room. The Henderson’s room cost them $7.50 a night. Charlotte saved the receipt.

But when they returned from their honeymoon, Charlotte had to give up her teaching job at the private Kinkaid School in Houston. The reason? Back then, women in Texas were prohibited from working after marriage.

“Mrs. Kinkaid didn’t want me to get married,” Charlotte explained. “She said, ‘What will the children do?’ I said, ‘They won’t have any trouble at all.’ She said, ‘Well, with your name changed, you will.’ I said, ‘Well, I can resign and you can get another teacher if you like.’ She said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want you to do that.’ But Mrs. Kinkaid was very particular about this. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll finish out the year.’ And that’s what I did. I finished out the year and only substituted after that.”

“I find that outrageous,” Marlo said. “Why should you resign just because you were getting married?”

“That’s what they did in those days,” John said.

John and Charlotte settled in Baytown, Texas, a marshy grassland just north of Galveston Bay. John prospered there, enjoying a thirty-four-year career in the oil trade as the head of business services at Humble Oil & Refining Company, which later merged with Exxon.

The couple never had children and expressed no sign of regret about that. “We just accepted what the Lord gave us,” John noted, “so we didn’t have any.”

Throughout their marriage, they told us, they enjoyed an active social life: he played poker, she played bridge, they bowled a bit, and did most of their traveling on cruise ships. They’d even gone on the Mississippi Queen—the very same paddleboat on which we once floated in our early time together.

Not surprisingly, Charlotte and John have outlived all of their friends and siblings. Is it genes, diet, exercise, or luck to be well-functioning super-centenarians? Could be a combination. Over the years, the couple often had a cocktail or wine before dinner. Charlotte never smoked, and John quit in 1950. He had bypass surgery in 1999, but he still walks a couple of miles every morning. Charlotte has never had a serious medical challenge.

When it was time for John to retire, the couple relocated to a place of familiarity.

“In all the time we were married,” John recalled, “we said that when I retired, we were going to move back to Austin. But when Longhorn Village came along, we decided that this was the place for us. So that’s where we ended up. We were the first couple to move in here.”

Guinness record or not, we didn’t give the Hendersons a pass on the battery of questions we asked our other couples. So we gave John and Charlotte a lightning round.

MARLO: No couple can survive eighty years without a healthy fight or two. Charlotte, you’ve been living with this guy since the premiere of Gone with the Wind. Surely he must occasionally drive you crazy.

CHARLOTTE: No, no. I don’t believe he could drive me crazy.

PHIL: What about you, John? Was there ever a moment when you just couldn’t see eye-to-eye with Charlotte?

JOHN: Oh, it would have been something trivial, I’m sure. But that was so seldom with us. Maybe we had a moment or two when I realized we just weren’t going to settle something right then and there, so I probably left the room and got out of the house to cool off. But we never let it last. That’s the main thing. We always got through the problem.

PHIL: Some couples can’t do that. Some just get on each other’s nerves once in a while.

JOHN: Well, yeah, but there’s a remedy for that.

PHIL: Which is?

JOHN: Never go to bed with a chip on your shoulder. If you can do that, you wake up in the morning and you’re ready to move forward. I always say, “Try to make tomorrow a better day than today.” It’s a give-and-take situation with us. I can’t insist on my way all the time, and Charlotte can’t insist on hers. So if we ever disagree, we try to smooth things over as soon as possible. We let each one have their say and work it out. You can’t carry that chip on your shoulder.

MARLO: Does he share the household responsibilities, Charlotte?

CHARLOTTE: Yes, he’s good help, but I wouldn’t say he ever took over.

MARLO: So you’re the chief cook.

CHARLOTTE: Yes, I like to cook.

JOHN: And I did a lot of the cooking on the weekends—barbecuing chickens out in the yard.

MARLO: That’s very Texas of you. I’ve noticed that Charlotte is wearing a diamond wedding ring and you’re wearing your football ring. Why no wedding band, John?

JOHN: Never thought of it.

MARLO: And you didn’t make him wear one, Charlotte?

CHARLOTTE: No, I didn’t even think about it.

MARLO: So this is why you get along so well. You don’t make demands on each other.

JOHN: That’s right.

MARLO: So that’s the secret to your record-breaking marriage, right there.

CHARLOTTE: Yes. And to have all the fun you can.

PHIL: I know it’s bad manners to talk politics in these parts, but by my count, John, you’ve lived through nineteen presidential administrations. Do you have a favorite president?

JOHN: Well, I thought Roosevelt did a good job. I remember voting for FDR when I was at the university. But I just drifted away from politics. I never got into politics, really.

PHIL: Smart choice. It’s probably the reason you’ve lived so long.

No matter how we tried to stir things up with these two, they were having no part of it. They took those vows in earnest eighty years ago, so why waste time bickering? In Charlotte’s words, it’s all about “the fun.”

That included going back to the St. Anthony hotel for their fiftieth anniversary. These days it’s a high-end property offering rooms that can go as high as $1,000 a night. When John called to make the reservation, he mentioned what they’d paid in 1939.

“They didn’t charge us $7.50,” he said, “but they did give us a suite and a bottle of champagne.”

Since their move to Austin a decade or so ago, John and Charlotte have made new friends and have stayed close to their nieces and nephews. John and his great-nephew, Jason Free, thirty-three, share the same birth date—Christmas Eve—and celebrate together every year.

We called Jason to thank him for helping to connect us with John and Charlotte, and he was just as sweet as they are. At one point he recounted one of his favorite memories of the couple.

“I was about sixteen or seventeen,” he said, “and I was visiting their home. Charlotte was out shopping or something, and John and I were in the house talking. Suddenly, we heard the garage door open, and John jumped up from his chair. ‘Oh, Charlotte’s home!’ he said, and then he ran out to the garage to greet her.”

So maybe the big secret to Charlotte and John Henderson’s long marriage is in the small stuff.

“You just have to be kind to each other,” John told us. “You have to respect each other. And it goes on and on like that.”

And maybe it’s jumping up from your chair when the other one comes home.