Bonnie and Gerald Herrin share a love story that goes back 60 years. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

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High school photographs of Gerald Herrin and his soon to be wife Bonnie Heilig before Bonnie's car accident. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Bonnie and Gerald Herrin shown in a recent photograph of themselves enjoying a trip near Myrtle Beach. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

It happened on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, on a long stretch of road between Winston-Salem and Lexington.

A car carrying two soldiers, home on leave, wanted to pass. Their vehicle whipped into the opposite lane and hit a Chevrolet coming toward them head on.

Bonnie Heilig, a high schooler, was in the front seat of the car struck by the soldiers. Her uncle was driving, and Bonnie was sitting on her mother’s lap to save space — there were seven people in the car.

Bonnie’s face and head hit something metal and hard above the windshield, and that’s all she would remember. Everyone else in the car was hurt, requiring transportation to the hospital, but the news was worse for Bonnie.

She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Later, at a Lexington funeral home, all of the jewelry already had been removed from Bonnie’s body when someone detected a pulse.

Bonnie, her face unrecognizable from the accident, was alive.

No one realized it then — in 1946 — but she already had embarked on a great journey of love.

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Navy yeoman Gerald Herrin’s ship had reached the Panama Canal when he opened the lone letter from his mother.

He was a bit surprised. Usually when he reached a destination, there were several letters from his girlfriend, Bonnie Heilig, waiting for him.

The letter from his mother explained things. Bonnie had been in a terrible car accident and wasn’t expected to live. Officers learned of the news Herrin had received and made calls for him to N.C. Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem.

Herrin’s girlfriend had survived, though she was still unconscious — doctors purposely kept her that way while they reconstructed her face.

A distraught Herrin just wanted to see her. When his ship finally reached Newport News, he was granted emergency leave to visit Bonnie.

Gerald hitchhiked the whole way to the Winston-Salem hospital.

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Bonnie had only regained consciousness the day before Gerald arrived.

After she came to terms with where she was, Bonnie asked an orderly to bring her a mirror. The image she saw sent her into hysterics, forcing doctors to sedate her again.

Bonnie’s head was encased in plaster of Paris with a halo around it. There were wires and prongs and slits for eyes, nose and mouth. Bonnie’s teeth were wired shut. Her jaw was broken, and she had to be fed through straws.

As one concession to vanity, the nurses had pulled some of her hair through the top of her mummified head.

“I looked like a freak,” Bonnie says today. “... My head couldn’t fit in a gallon bucket.”

When he first stepped into Bonnie’s room, Gerald turned around, thinking he had made a mistake.

The patient before him was more like an alien from outer space than his 16-year-old girlfriend.

“I don’t know how he stood to look at me,” Bonnie says.

And who knew how Bonnie would look as her rebuilt face healed?

It was a lot for an 18-year-old boy to take in.

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Bonnie and Gerald first met on a double date of sorts, except Gerald was dating Bonnie’s cousin.

Bonnie didn’t realize it then, but she had made an impression on Gerald Herrin.

It wasn’t until he was home on his first leave from the Navy — Gerald had enlisted Aug. 16, 1945 — that he called on Bonnie while she was working a Saturday job at the Rayless department store in Salisbury.

“He remembered me, thank God,” Bonnie says. “He took me out for lunch (at Woolworth’s) that day, and that was the beginning.”

Over the rest of his leave, Gerald kept visiting. One day he even borrowed his sister’s bike and rode it to Bonnie’s house.

“That’s what you call love and dedication,” Bonnie says.

The young couple began writing letters to each other and, whenever he had leave, Gerald would spend as much time as he could with his new girlfriend.

“You learn a lot about each other from writing,” Bonnie says.

Gerald’s Naval stint took him to Bambridge, Md.; Davisville R.I.; and Port Neuneme, Calif., before his assignment to the USS Gosper at Pearl Harbor.

As part of its end-of-war cleanup operations, the Gosper was being used as a hospital ship and transport vessel, taking soldiers home to Seattle.

Herrin says he was lucky to be named yeoman and given a clerical office with a porthole view. “I really had it easy,” he adds.

When it came time to decommission the Gosper, it sailed toward Norfolk, via the Panama Canal.

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One Sunday, while Gerald was off in the Pacific, Bonnie’s family decided to take her mother’s car on a trip to a children’s home in Virginia, to visit two of Bonnie’s cousins.

Bonnie was attending Granite Quarry High School.

It was on the family’s return, heading toward Lexington, that the accident occurred.

While Bonnie had no way of knowing, all the people in her mother’s car were, for a time, in Baptist Hospital with her. (The soldiers also survived the crash.)

Bonnie’s mother, Mamie, suffered a broken pelvis and a shattered arm, which remained bowed for the rest of her life.

Many of Bonnie’s classmates at Granite Quarry High visited her at Baptist. Some donated blood to help with her recovery.

The USS Gosper arrived at Newport News, Va., for its decommissioning on Feb. 24, 1946, and it took Gerald several hours of thumbing for rides to reach Winston-Salem.

Bonnie couldn’t believe it, but Gerald, even after that initial shock of seeing her, kept coming back.

“He saw something deeper than the scars,” she says.

Since he had returned to a new Naval assignment on the East Coast, Gerald was able to visit Bonnie at the hospital and at home every two to three weeks. He would obtain leave out of Charleston, S.C.

Bonnie credits the doctors at Baptist Hospital for saving her life — and her face, though the contours of her nose and jawline had changed. She continually had to travel back to Baptist for more procedures, such as fixing her tear ducts.

“She was a very pretty girl,” Gerald says, trying to explain his devotion. “I think for all that she went through, she was a very beautiful girl.”

Toward the end of his 11 months and 13 days in the Navy, Gerald rode a bicycle again to Bonnie’s home on St. Paul’s Church Road. Bonnie was working in a sweet potato patch and sweating from the heat.

They were allowed to go to the family home’s front room, where Gerald asked her to be his wife. She quickly said yes.

The couple were married Aug. 31, 1946, in the parsonage of the Rev. D.W. Digh in the Rowan Mills area. They honeymooned at the Empire Hotel in Salisbury. He was 18, she was 16.

“I’m the sweet potato bride,” Bonnie says.

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The government helped Gerald attend Salisbury Commercial (Business) College.

He then worked as a bookkeeper for Miller Equipment Co., Innes Street Drug Co. and W.H. Leonard Jewelers.

By 34, he became manager for Carolina Ventilated Awning Co. after being its office manager for 10 years. But he proved to be most successful as a sales representative for manufacturers.

The job often put him on the road.

Bonnie went to work at the Kress store’s candy counter. She then worked the third shift at Cartex Mill before going to beauty school and opening up her own salon at the couple’s house off St. Paul’s Church Road.

Being a beautician allowed Bonnie more flexibility in raising the couple’s four daughters — Kay, Dee Dee, Jane and Lou Anne, all of whom went to college.

“They’ve got the college degrees, and I’ve got the blue veins, but I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Bonnie says.

Gerald and Bonnie served as Sunday School teachers and youth leaders at church. The girls say they also had a knack for making things fun around the house.

The Herrins had the first bicycle-built-for-two among their friends and a backyard trampoline. When the weather forced them inside, there always seemed to be puzzles to put together and paints and crayons to play with.

“If they acted like they were disappointed in us, it would just kill us,” says Kay Dover, a well-known local Realtor.

Bonnie says the girls turned out to be “well-rounded kids.”

There are now eight grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and all the sons-in-laws and other spouses that come with the large family.

Two of the daughters have master’s degrees in education, and another girl has a master’s in nursing.

The extended family also has three ministers and five ordained deacons.

Not bad, when you consider Bonnie’s fateful trip to the funeral home long ago.

“The Lord had a plan for me, a great plan,” she says.

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Despite Gerald’s heart attack in 1994, he and Bonnie have traveled extensively across the world.

They also have loved the beach over the years and have been actively involved in the church and community. Gerald is a founding member of the Faith Civitan Club.

At the end of this month, Gerald and Bonnie will have been married 64 years.

They seldom talk about that Sunday afternoon wreck in 1946. Their memories about many of the details have faded.

“I think Daddy’s story is as beautiful as Mother’s,” daughter Dee Dee Moody says, “When I think that at age 18 he was so in love with Mother that he stuck by her even though she never looked like the same girl he had fallen in love with before the accident.”

Some months after the wreck, Bonnie’s father went to the Lexington Funeral Home where her body had been taken, paid the bill and received her jewelry. Bonnie had no idea what had become of her “beads and bangles.”

Because of the accident, Bonnie was never able to graduate from Granite Quarry High, but her classmates include her in every reunion.

Guys who donated blood toward Bonnie’s recovery usually kid her that she’s mean because their blood runs through her.

But Bonnie Herrin keeps a soft spot for her one true love, Gerald, the guy who has always stuck with her.

“I love every ounce of his body,” Bonnie says.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263, or mwineka@ salisburypost.com.