They gazed into each other’s eyes. They kissed. The magic returned. It was as if they hadn’t been apart for 50 years.
That was the joyous reunion of Diane Harris and Rodney Day.
In the late 1950s, Harris and Day were high-school sweethearts in the Napa Valley north of San Francisco.
But everything changed when they were involved in a horrific car accident and became star-crossed lovers.
Harris was in a hospital bed with her back broken when her mother told her Day wanted to break up with her.
Her mother also told Day, who was badly injured, too, that her daughter wanted to break up with him.
It was all a lie to split them — and it almost worked. They went on to live separate lives until Day’s wife died in 2007.
Then he tracked Harris down.
She described their reunion last spring.
“We kissed and that was it. We just felt like we had never been parted. It was surreal,” Harris, 66, told The Post yesterday.
In June 1959, the couple went to a drive-in movie, though Harris doesn’t think they paid much attention to the film.
While they were driving home, Day said, he drifted off the highway and hit something. His car ended up in a ditch.
Both had terrible injuries.
Most of Day’s top teeth were knocked out.
Harris was thrown through the windshield and suffered a broken back and a crushed foot and ankle.
Day was transported to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif., because he was in the military. Harris was taken to another hospital.
Harris wasn’t permitted visitors, but her friends came anyway. Everybody but Rodney.
“I was very angry,” she told The Post. “I was very depressed and very angry.”
Harris didn’t know at the time that her mother, not her boyfriend, was to blame.
So, as the couple told the Napa Valley Register, their lives took different paths.
Harris got married in 1963, and she and her husband had three children. She divorced and got married a second time. She ran a bed and breakfast. In 1984, she got divorced again.
After leaving the Navy, Day got married and had two children. He became a deputy sheriff and lived in both Southern California, where he attended college, and the town of Quincy, north of Lake Tahoe.
His wife died in 2007 after 43 years of marriage.
Day had often thought of Harris over the years, but he made no serious attempt to contact her until his wife died.
Then he went on the Internet and found what he thought was an address for her.
He mailed a letter (right).
“I wasn’t sure if it was her, and I’m not good on the phone, so I just wrote her a letter,” he said. “I figured that if it’s not her, she can just wad it up.”
He included his e-mail address, and she replied immediately. There followed a flurry of phone calls and e-mails and, two weeks later, a reunion in Calistoga, the Napa Valley town where Harris was living.
Both were very nervous when they finally met, but before long, “it was like 50 years apart hadn’t happened,” Day recalled, adding that Harris was as cute as she was in high school.
On July 4, Day gave Harris his class ring for the second time as the two became engaged.
On Saturday, they got married at Elks Lodge in Napa, with Harris saying, “At last, it’s happening.”
“I’m in seventh heaven,” she said. “Oh, my God, yes!”