FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Eloise Rasberry met Roy Adams in the early 1940s in Bay Minette, where they began dating during high school there.

“I guess it was about the 10th grade,” Eloise Adams said this week at her Fairhope home, explaining that students didn’t date until they were 15 or 16 in those days. “But we kind of knew we liked each other from the start.”

Born a few months apart in 1927, Roy and Eloise were both only 19 when they married on July 20, 1946, just one year after graduating from Bay Minette High School.

During the first days of their budding high school romance, Roy’s father was injured on his Baldwin County farm, and Roy had to leave school for awhile.

“The second semester of the 10th grade Roy helped with the farm, but then he came back and caught up with his studies in the 11th grade,” Eloise said. “He was a hard worker.”

In their senior year, life changed for the young couple.

The military draft age was lowered to 18 in November 1942, and Roy faced entering the Army after his 18th birthday on Feb. 7, 1945.

“But he and three of his friends decided to volunteer for the Navy, so they enlisted before their 18th birthdays and before they would graduate in May,” Adams said. “They had to leave, I think it was the last of March, to go up to Chicago for boot camp. On our graduation night, they had four empty chairs sitting on the stage with a flag draped over them. The school gave the diplomas to their mothers.”

While in boot camp, Roy was one of 30 sailors selected from several thousand for the Navy’s V-12 college scholarship program, that would eventually result, with the help of the GI Bill, in his earning bachelor and master’s degrees.

“He was a very intelligent and smart person,” Eloise said.

But what happened next, for just over a year between the spring of 1945 and ’46 for a young sailor based in Illinois and his girlfriend living far away in South Alabama, will seldom, if ever, occur again in these days of e-mail, text messages and cell phones.

“This was the only means of communication we had,” said Eloise, carefully opening one of Roy’s love letters to her dated Jan. 29 1946, which she had selected from a stack of hundreds on the couch next to her. “For a long time, we wrote every day or every other day.”

In fact, that particular letter was the second one written that same day.

“Hello Dear,” Roy’s letter began. “I think you can read a few more lines today? Hope you can anyway. Wish I were there to give you a kiss for each word in this. I love you so much ‘til I’ll never get enough of your kisses — I’d sure like to try anyway tonight. It’s only five hours since I wrote you — seems like five days.”

The envelope of that three-page letter — a lot of words in a three-page letter — from 63 years ago is faded beige with a small dark stain on the front. But many of the letters are much more weathered, and some are crumbling around the edges and fragile to the touch. Most of the ones from Roy to Eloise are gently but securely bound with a satin ribbon in packages of more than 40 letters each.

The complete correspondence of that one year’s literary courtship between two Alabama teenagers totals well over 200 letters.

For 59 years, the letters traveled with the couple from their homes in Baldwin County to Tuscaloosa to Georgia to Sulligent and York, Ala., and then back to South Alabama in Mobile and eventually to a bay front home in Montrose.

During those years, Roy worked as a high school principal and for 31 years with IBM, and Eloise as a legal secretary, homemaker, and from 1985 to 1998 as a columnist for the Fairhope Courier, writing “Eloise’s Kitchen” twice a month.

The couple raised two daughters, and Eloise now has four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Roy retired from IBM in 1987, and then worked as a computer studies consultant to Bishop State Junior College for seven years. After a small stroke in 1995 and the onset of Parkinson’s disease, he died in 2001.

“I occasionally looked at them, especially after his death,” Eloise said of her treasured letters. “They were in the back of a closet near my bedroom.”

And then Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

“We went back to the house after the hurricane and you could see all the way through it,” Adams said. “It was quite a shock. I knew the water had been high and rough.”

Eloise said the storm proved to be a blessing, however, because it required her to move from the house she had lived in alone for four years.

“I said, ‘God, I need to get out of here,’ but I didn’t know how to do it or where to start,” she said, talking about the difficulty of moving from the family home where they had lived since 1976, and which had weathered other hurricanes and storms and gathered a lifetime of memories. “So he said, ‘I’ll give you a little help.’ And he gave me a lot of help. So, as horrible and as awful as it was looking back, it was a blessing for me.”

After that hurricane, which left precious few treasured objects, Eloise moved to a house in Fairhope. The storm took much, and apparently her love letters as well, she thought.

But a few months ago, she was contacted by a Montrose family who had discovered something in a shed they were cleaning out not far from where her house once stood along the bay in Montrose.

It was a letter from one Eloise Rasberry to Roy Adams.

“I was just going to pitch the garbage bag, but I opened it up and a letter fell out that was dated from the ’40s,” Wally Milham said this week. “So I began to read it aloud to my wife who was in the loft, and my two kids walked in and they were listening. It was just a heart-touching letter that Mrs. Eloise had written to Roy, who became her husband. She was basically telling him what she had cooked for lunch that day, and how someone had brought some shrimp from the bay, and she had cooked some various vegetables and what not.”

Milham found a second letter from Eloise to Roy, and then his wife found a grocery sack of them in the loft of the shed. The Milhams had bought the house about a year earlier from the man who bought Eloise’s house, he said, and must have moved some of the valuables to that shed but was never able to return them to Adams.

“I didn’t know if either of them was alive and wasn’t really sure how to address that,” Milham said. “We just kind of left it alone, but one day I Googled her name and it popped up on Facebook.”

Eloise said she had probably been on Facebook less than a month when she received Milham’s message.

“It (Facebook) has really been a blessing, because I have no family or anything in the area, and I can keep up them with and their pictures.”

On Nov. 8, Milham and his two children, who wanted very much to attend the reunion of the letters with Mrs. Eloise, he said, met with Adams at her Fairhope home.

“They were all eyes and ears,” Milham said of his two children as they watched their father and Adams exchange the letters and talk. “We were there for several hours and had a wonderful visit. My kids couldn’t stop talking about it afterwards.”

Eloise said she has since read several dozen of the letters after their return, but it’s not been easy.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said, her eyes welling up again. “I guess sometimes it’s kind of hard to do, when he’s not here.”

She held Roy’s letter from 1946 in her hands, and looked down at a calendar she had made a few years ago, with pictures showing her husband at different times in his life.

“We had a good life, and God has been good to us,” she said. “He certainly has taken care of me.”

Eloise said one of the last items she took from her Montrose home as Hurricane Katrina approached was a large folder of every column she had written for the Courier. The folder was near the door as she left, which she picked it up on the way out.

Though she’s a “little new” to computers, she said, she’s now thinking of self-publishing a cookbook based on those columns.

As for the storm-tossed love letters, she thinks it something of a miracle that her husband’s romantic words written so long ago had somehow found their way back to her.

“Some of my friends said, ‘When are we going to sit down together and read those letters,” Eloise said laughing. “I told them, ‘I just don’t know about that.’”