A Crystal Lake love story: Couple married 65 years after graduating together from Central High in 1953

Barb Kurpiers admits she pursued her husband, Ron, when a classmate told her he was again single.

“He was always so good looking,” she said, followed by Ron Kurpiers piping in with “and she loves younger men.”

Barb Kurpiers just turned 90 in January, and Ron Kurpiers is 89.

What makes the Crystal Lake couple’s relationship unique is that although they went to school and graduated together from Crystal Lake Central High, they never really knew each other back then in a class of 120 people. Instead they reconnected much later in life. The two reconnected through the class of 1953’s monthly meetup, started dating and got married seven years ago.

It wasn’t quite that simple, however, Barb said. She invited Ron to her 80th birthday party shortly after his wife died, and he started coming to the monthly meetups. It took a few years for them to officially start dating.

Once they did, Ron moved in with Barb for the first year before they decided to marry.

“We were living in sin,” Ron Kurpiers said.

What they have together now is a second chance at love and a partner to keep busy with, even at an advanced age, after both lost their spouses.

“There is a distinct advantage, being married previously. Unless you are a stone cold idiot, you know you have made mistakes” in previous relationships, he said. “You remember what they were and try not to repeat them again.”

The couple never really knew each other that well at Crystal Lake Central, having been part of different friend groups, said Barb Kurpiers, who was Barb Pearson then. Her family lived on a farm off Route 31 – she attended a one-room school for her primary school years – while Ron was a town guy who worked at a Crystal Lake drugstore after school, earning enough to have a car of his own.

“There is a distinct advantage, being married previously. Unless you are a stone cold idiot, you know you have made mistakes.”

—  Ron Kurpier, who remarried at age 82

After graduation, Ron enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He ended up stationed in New Mexico and married his wife, Billie, there in 1957. She had two children from a previous relationship, and they had three together. After his service ended, the family moved back to Illinois and lived in Libertyville. They were together for 57 years when Billie died in 2014.

“After you have been married for close to 60 years, and all of the sudden you are just you ... you are just lost,” Ron said.

Barb married Andrew Nelson when she was 18, and she took a job at the Piggly Wiggly in Crystal Lake, which later became an Eagle grocery store. She continued to work there through two children, retiring after 33 years.

In 2000, the Nelsons had just moved to Oakbrook Estates, a 55-and-older home community in Crystal Lake, when Andy died.

But through her retirement, Barb said she still stayed busy. She delivered food to seniors for the Salvation Army’s Meals on Wheels program and volunteered at a food pantry and her church.

“She donated an enormous amount of her time to people who needed it,” her husband said.

They both stay busy now. They often attend events at The Dole and the Raue Center for the Arts, and take vacations together. They have a two-week vacation to Disneyworld set for the spring. It’s the longest vacation he has ever planned, he said. It’s all part of staying young.

“As you age a lot of things happen. I am always preaching to her ... get up and move around. If you don’t move you are going to lose it,” Ron Kurpiers said.

They have a photo of the two of them at The Dole recently, taken by an unknown photographer who airdropped the photo to Ron’s phone. It shows the couple in matching plaid shirts, walking hand-in-hand. It’s now framed in their living room.

Intimacy is important, even in your 80s and 90s, Ron Kurpiers said. “That is why we always walk and hold hands.”