When Millie Bohannon, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, told her friends about the new boy she was dating, they said, “Don’t fall for Johnny Genier; he’ll love you and leave you.”
Well, it was a little late for that advice, but Millie didn’t tell her friends that. She simply said, “Well, I’ll find out.”
She dated John three years, and when he proposed she had no hesitation. And after 60 years of marriage, she has no regrets.
“I’ve been truly blessed to have such a wonderful man all these years,” she says now, gazing at her groom, who is sitting to her right in the living room of their Rock Hill apartment. The two are reminiscing about their six decades of marriage and the three years leading up to their wedding.
“Her friends weren’t lying when they said I wouldn’t commit in high school,” John said.
It wasn’t that he was playing the field, and it certainly wasn’t that he didn’t respect girls. He was raised in church and saved at age 11. He knew about honor and respect and putting others first. But a major life event right before he turned 16 had changed his world.
“I found out my mother had terminal cancer,” he said. “And back then, they didn’t have some of the treatments they have today, so it was just a matter of keeping her comfortable until she passed, which was about eight months later, in December. And the last five or six months of that period she was in the hospital.”
Suddenly, John had to help care for his 5-year-old brother and with other things around the house. Plus, he had to go to work, because there probably wasn’t going to be enough money for him to go to Virginia Tech as planned.
“My faith was tested,” he says. “I wasn’t quite as good a Christian as I thought. I did a lot of arguing with God about why this happened. After five or six months, I realized that God didn’t owe me answers, but he had promised me help, and once I got that straight, the Lord began to do a lot of miracles in my life, of which Millie was one. But that last year-and-a-half of high school, I just didn’t have the time to be in any kind of committed relationship.”
He was able to make it in Virginia Tech’s co-op program, which meant he would go to school three months and work three months. He would do his first year at a local technical college and then transfer to Virginia Tech.
“I had to have a 3.5 GPA that first year or I couldn’t transfer,” he said. “I got a 4.0, which I had never done in high school, so I knew that was God helping me.”
After he got that first year of college behind him, things began to ease up a little and he could relax. And that’s when he met Millie, at a dance. She was there with his friend Ernie, and John was there with a friend he’d known in high school.
“My first thought about Millie was, She’s very attractive,” John said. “My second? How did Ernie get a date with her?
He saw her just once more before it was time for their annual Easter tradition. Every year, he and his buddies would dress up and take their dates to a church that one of them belonged to, then they would go out to lunch.
“When we got to the restaurant, we wound up sitting with one person between us,” John said. “We kept leaning back in our chairs to talk to each other.”
At the end of the lunch, John knew enough. Not only was Millie cute, but she was personable, and she shared his faith. He prayed on the way home and decided he was going to ask her out.
“I knew if I didn’t take that step then, I might regret it forever,” he said. “But first I had to call Ernie. I wanted to know if they were going steady. I didn’t think they were, but I had to be sure.” Ernie confirmed that he and Millie were just friends, so at 2:30 p.m. on Easter Sunday—April 17, 1960—John called Millie and asked if she wanted to go with him to his church that night. Millie said yes, and that was the day, and the moment, that their love story began.
“I will never forget it,” John said.
It was a magic night.
“I remember him slowly putting his arms around me as we were sitting in the pew at church,” Millie said, grinning as her mind went back in time. “Neither of us remember what the preacher preached about.”
After the service, they went out for ice cream.
“We had our first kiss that night, at the Reynolds Metal Office Building in Richmond,” Millie said, moving on to her favorite part of the story.
But John was thinking about the details. The Reynolds Metal Building was a popular spot in downtown Richmond. It had huge columns, and there was a fountain and benches to sit on. The air was cool and crisp, and the two of them talked for about an hour. Then they stood up to go. John had promised Millie’s mom that he would have her home by 10.
“I thought we would have a good night kiss, and I would tell her I enjoyed the evening and she would say the same thing,” John said. “But instead, after our kiss, she put her hand to her nose and said, ‘You’d better get me home because I got a nosebleed.’ Not quite the ending I was hoping for.”
Looking over at her now, in their living room, he says: “I think, though, that she shared the same thoughts I had, that this was something special and that the Lord had brought us together for a reason.”
The Lord had kept them for each other. Yes, he dated different girls in high school, but he didn’t have time to invest in a relationship, so he didn’t meet Millie at that point, when it might have upset her that he couldn’t commit.
Millie smiled at him now. “I’ve always been thankful I was dating Ernie because if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have met you.”
John nodded. “God worked all of that out.”
It was still a challenging courtship because that fall John would be leaving for his first three months at Virginia Tech, which was about three hours away in Blacksburg. They spent as much time as they could together that summer after Millie finished high school.
“Then I went off to school, hoping she would wait for me,” John said. Millie went to work for C&P Telephone Company in Richmond and found ways to occupy her time.
“Our courtship was not what you see on a Hallmark channel,” John said. “Millie knew there wouldn’t be any grand gestures since I would need all of my money for college. We squeezed a date in when we could. She hung in there with me through all of that.”
John got a little creative when he wanted to cement their relationship during his sophomore year in college. Knowing he could never afford an engagement ring, he gave Millie a ring from a bubblegum machine. It only cost him a few cents, but it was a token of his love for her, and Millie treasured it.
“I still have it,” she said.
John made their engagement official at his college ring dance during his junior year. His dad had saved his mom’s engagement ring, so John had the stone reset and gave it to Millie.
“I cried I was so happy,” Millie said.
They had planned to marry after John graduated, but when they realized the co-op program required his last year to be a straight 12 months on campus, they decided to get married a year earlier.
John’s dad gave him the tiny trailer that he had been using during an on-site job in Washington, D.C. They moved it to a mobile home park near college where mostly students lived, and Millie’s job transferred her to an office in Radford, which was about 20 minutes away from the college.
“We had three months to plan our wedding,” Millie said. “I had a maid of honor and a flower girl.”
John made enough money to pay his tuition and Millie made enough for the trailer park rent and food. The trailer was sweet, Millie said. The bathroom was so tiny you could barely turn around. And sometimes the cold Virginia mountain snow piled up at the back door.
“But we were in love,” John said.
And that has never changed throughout their 60 years together—in good times and bad.
John graduated from Virginia Tech and immediately went to work for Dupont, making $8,000 a year—enough for Millie to be a stay-at-home mom when their first baby, Mary, arrived in their second year of marriage. A few years later, their son, Johnny, was born and their family was complete, although they did struggle through a miscarriage before Johnny came.
“Millie was carrying twin boys and we lost them,” John said. “That was a hard trial.”
They moved around a bit in the early years of their marriage—from Richmond to Salisbury, North Carolina, where John went to work for Fiber Industries, and then to Rome, Georgia, before settling in Rock Hill in 1975 for his job at Hoechst-Celanese. They made their physical home in the Shandon subdivision off of Shandon Road and their spiritual home became Catawba Baptist Church, where they have loved serving all these years. John started teaching Sunday school, and Millie joined the choir and became part of the women’s ministry.
John retired early from Celanese, at age 58, when the Rock Hill plant began to phase out. He then worked in his family’s one-hour photo business until it also began to phase out under the digital era. And, finally, he did seasonal work for a while with Jackson-Hewett Tax Service.
They’re both 81 now, and life is a bit slower. With Millie’s scoliosis, moving around in their home on Shandon was becoming difficult, so they moved from their Shandon Road home to the apartment a couple of years ago, and Mary and her family moved into the house on Shandon Road.
These days, Millie and John love spending time with each other and their family and church friends, which they got to do in a big way during the Feb. 26 celebration of their 60th wedding anniversary at Catawba Baptist.
Their Catawba church family has been a big part of their lives, praying with them through Mary’s adoption of their first grandchild, Nick, from Russia, through Millie’s two strokes in December and John’s kidney cancer.
“I don’t think I would have made it through my strokes without their prayers,” Millie said. "And I’ll never forget how my girlfriends Fran, Helen and Hazel, went with us to see Dean and Mary get off the plane with Nick.”
That was one of their most joyous moments. Mary’s doctor had told her she probably wouldn’t be able to have kids. And Johnny was a perpetual bachelor for a while, so they weren’t sure if they would have grandkids. Now they have six: The Lord blessed Mary with a biological son at age 44, so she has Nick and Derek. And Johnny and Adrianna share four: Liam, Kylie, Fox and 6-year-old Louna, who all live in Richmond.
“I think the good Lord has pulled us through,” John said. “I’m convinced the Lord put us together. Millie is probably the most compassionate, loving person I ever met. She has never met an enemy."
They’ve always had differences, but nothing they couldn’t work through.
“In marriage, you just have to find a way to make it work,” John said. “For example, I’ve always liked football, and Millie hasn’t. So while I would go to a game to actually watch it, she would go to see her friends and meet new people. That is what she loves.
“I read things on Facebook where people are saying that marriage is so hard, and that you’ve got to work at it every day. We’ve been so blessed. I don’t think we’ve had to work at it that hard.”
He does tease her a lot, Millie says. “He’s always asking me if any of my boyfriends have been to see me.”
“That’s because she always remembers them when we talk about our lives together,” John says, smiling at her. “We’re very different. She can remember every person she has ever met. I remember facts and events. I’ve learned that you don’t have to have the same personality in a marriage, but you do have to be compatible.
“Never in the 60 years that we’ve been married did either of us ever think that we wouldn’t be together forever,” John said. Which brings their story back to the advice of Millie’s high school friends during her senior year.
By now, Millie could probably tell them a thing or two.
