HOPE ? They dated in high school and now they’re together again as newlyweds – nearly 70 years after they parted.

Fred Schneider and Florence Shetter were classmates at Chapman High School in Kansas when he, with some trepidation, asked her to a football banquet in 1934.

“She might say no,” Schneider said of his feelings at the time. “She was so good-looking.”

Not to worry, though – she thought it was a great idea, too.

“I was elated,” she recalled. “I was so excited. I felt like a queen sitting there beside him.”

But the high school romance wasn’t to last. Her father didn’t approve, perhaps because Fred didn’t go to the Shetter family’s church.

“He didn’t want us to go together,” Florence said. “I still don’t really know why. I should have asked a little more about it.”

Fred wanted to marry Florence right from the start, but faced with the parental opposition he decided in 1936 to join a couple of his friends in heading for California.

“They asked if he wanted to go along, and he said he looked to the sky and God said to go,” Florence said.

With no time for a face-to-face goodbye, Fred wrote her a long letter and had his sister deliver it to her at school.

“I didn’t know what to think,” she said. “It was a lonesome feeling.”

Even during the Depression, Fred managed to find a job as a truck driver in Los Angeles, working for Farmer Brothers Coffee. And he ended up making his career there, getting a series of promotions.

In 1942, he met Margaret Allen, who eventually became his wife and mother of their three sons.

“She also was very good-looking,” he said.

They moved to Torrance, Calif., where Fred worked at a new coffee production plant, becoming its manager in 1961. He retired in 1979, and he and Margaret settled in for retirement near the beach.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas, Florence had married Millard Hostetter – a member of her church – a year after Fred headed for California. The two also spent some time out West, working a few winters in the California orange groves, but always returning home to Kansas.

A few years later Millard Hostetter took over the family farm, south of Hope, and he and his wife became parents of two boys and two girls.

The two old high school sweethearts lost track of each other over the years, not talking again until 1961. At one point, Florence saw Fred’s mother and asked how he was doing, leading him to write a letter, the first of many the two were to exchange.

In 2002, Millard Hostetter died, followed less than a year later by Margaret Schneider. The surviving spouses shared their news with each other in letters, and Florence also sent her phone number.

“It was about three months after my wife died,” Fred recalled. “I was still grieving and I was by myself. I like to talk, so I called and that opened the floodgates.”

As their letters and calls became more frequent, they decided they might like to see each other again, for the first time in 67 years.

Freddy Schneider, left, and Florence Hostetter-Schneider share a laugh in Hope, Kan. The Dickinson County natives, who dated in high school, reunited and recently married after losing their spouses within the past three years.

Fred flew to Wichita, and Florence’s oldest son, Don, and his wife, Marilyn, took her to the airport for the reunion.

The two recognized each other right away.

“It seemed like we had never been apart,” Fred said. “We hugged and had a kiss.”

Fred said he still wanted to marry her, but it took some time to work out all the details.

“We didn’t want to be together, without being married,” Florence said. “We wanted to set a good example.”

“Yes, set a good example for the kids,” Fred said.

On May 1, they married in Encinitas, Calif., he at 90 and she at 88.

The newlyweds, back in Kansas this week for visits with Florence’s family and friends, head back to California on Wednesday. One of Fred’s goals before returning home was to take his bride for a ride on her grandson’s four-wheeler.

“We’re not going to act like old people,” he said. “That was one of my rules.”

Both say they aren’t sad about their time apart.

“God took care of us all those years,” Fred said. “She had a super life, and I had a super life.”

Had things worked out differently, Fred never would have ended up in California where he found a successful career, and they wouldn’t have met and married the spouses that they loved so much, and had their children.

Things happen for a reason, Florence said, and now she and Fred are back together for a reason.

“I think if God didn’t want us together, he would have taken one of us,” she said.