Wedding Bells for Two 95-Year-Olds

Joy Morrow-Nulton and John Shults Jr., both widowed twice after 60-plus years of marriage, celebrated their 95th birthdays and wedding.

Joy Morrow-Nulton keeps a diary, but she doesn’t need it to remember the date of her first lunch with John Shults Jr. in upstate New York. “It was May 14, 2019, and the restaurant was A Slice of Italy,” Ms. Morrow-Nulton, 95, said. The specifics of their conversation mostly escape her because she was bored. But two years later, she is pleased she pretended otherwise and stuck it out. “I hope I make it to 100 so we can have five years together,” she said on May 22, just after her wedding to Mr. Shults in Ulster, N.Y. “He’s a delight to be with.” Her son, John Morrow, 69, understood that well before he became his mother’s late-life matchmaker. Ms. Morrow-Nulton and Mr. Shults were both born in May 1926. When Mr. Morrow introduced them, they knew they were close in age but not that their lives had landed them in the same boat: Both had been widowed twice after 60-plus years of marriage. And both lived alone in their own houses, Ms. Morrow-Nulton’s in Tillson, N.Y., and Mr. Shults’s in nearby Hurley. They also had been making a practice of gently badgering Mr. Morrow, who had known Mr. Shults since 1976, for more of his time.