DOBSON, N.C. (AP) — Curtis Marion and Colleen Hutchins were teenagers when they started dating.

He's 82 now, and she's 81, and they're finally getting married.

Their friends at the elderly nutrition site in Dobson hosted a cake-cutting and bridal luncheon, and the happy couple invited them all to their wedding on March 13.

Their teenage romance lasted just a few months. They never forgot each other, but both had enjoyed long marriages to other people, with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

But his wife died in May.

Hutchins' husband died 14 years ago, and she still wore her wedding band.

Each couple was married in 1946, and they had remained friends. But Marion had moved out of state for a 34-year career in a shipyard in Newport News, Va., and they had lost touch.

Neither knew that the other's spouse had died.

Then, on Sept. 15, overcome with grief and loneliness at the Stuart, Va., farm where he had retired, Marion picked up the phone to call his old friends.

"I was practically crying in my house, and something spoke to me and said, 'Call the Hutchinses,'" Marion said.

When Hutchins answered the phone, she didn't recognize his voice.

They talked. He asked if he could come by and see her sometime.

She said yes. Later that day, she took off her wedding ring. She hadn't dated anyone in those 14 years since her husband died but said she realized now that she could and asked her children if it would be OK with them.

On Marion's birthday, just four days after that phone call renewing their friendship, she treated him to a birthday dinner at the Libby Hill seafood restaurant in Mount Airy.

"You think we're going out to eat, but I'm taking you home with me," Marion told her on the drive.

"If I'd known that, I'd have packed my suitcase," she told him.

She was joking. But they have talked on the phone almost every day since.

She loves everything about him.

"His mannerisms, he's really polite, kind-hearted, and I think he's good-looking," she said.

"Let's put it this way," he said. "I admired the little girl I met so many years ago so strongly, it never faded out of my mind."

They'd first met on a blind date, running into each other through friends of friends. He stopped going to see her because he broke his leg in a car accident.

She went to visit him after he got home from the hospital but brought along her new boyfriend, also named Curtis. She and Curtis Hutchins were married on Dec. 8, 1946. They had five children, including four who are still living, along with six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Curtis Marion and Audrey Mosley were married Aug. 12, 1946. They had two children, a granddaughter and two great-grandchildren.

He was a Surry County native but in 1951 moved to work at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., where he was an electronics test design engineer, setting up and testing missile and torpedo control systems on Navy ships and submarines. He retired in 1985 and moved to Stuart.

She raised her children and worked 20 years for Perry Manufacturing, sewing buttons on women's jackets and blouses, and working as an inspector.

When they renewed their romance, she said it was like they had known each other all their lives. He had a ring ready a week or two before he proposed.

"We need to be together, so let's get married," he told her on Nov. 4, a bad knee keeping him from kneeling.

"I later bought him a band and asked him to marry me," she said.

She has a doctor's appointment the day after their wedding, and they plan to postpone their honeymoon for warmer weather.

"It'll be a honeymoon to be with her no matter where we're at," he said.