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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer Updated 7:18 AM Thursday, June 18, 2009

First, he had to figure out which gal was in his arms.

Charlie Coles was talking about the night he met Dolores “Dee Dee” Jackson and her sister, Darla, at a dance in Oxford in the early 1960s.

“I danced with her and next, it turns out, I danced with her sister,” the Miami University basketball coach was saying. “I thought there was just one of them ’cause they looked alike. So the next dance I resume my conversation (with Dee Dee) and she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about ... I thought she was playing a joke.”

He figured it out and soon the girl in his arms was also in his heart. Because of it, Charlie and Dee Dee — who’ll be married 45 years in October — will be part of a world-record attempt on the Miami University campus Saturday, June 20.

As part of the school’s bicentennial celebration, the alumni association is hoping to land a spot in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for the most couples renewing their wedding vows at one time. The mark was set last year in Pittsburgh with 624.

What is known around the Oxford campus as Miami Mergers (one Miami grad marrying another) and Miami Acquisitions (a grad married to a non-Miamian) have been invited to meet at the Upham Hall Arch for Saturday’s 4:15 p.m. ceremony.

According to campus legend, if you kiss your date at midnight beneath the glowing lantern that hangs in the archway, you will wed.

While Charlie said he and Dee Dee didn’t do that (“I don’t know where our first kiss was,” he chuckled), their family has fully embraced the Miami marriage tradition.

Their two children — Chris and Mary — are taking part Saturday, as are Darla and her husband. Yet, of all the couples involved, few have a more colorful story than Charlie and Dee Dee.

He was the high-scoring guard on the Miami basketball team when they wed his senior season. She was a local girl and Miami product who was part of a singing group — the Fontones — that was one of the area’s hottest “girl” groups of the doo-wop era.

“When we married, Coach (Dick) Shrider wasn’t happy,” Charlie laughed. “Thank God for Coach (Darrell) Hedrick. He saved me.”

Charlie and Dee Dee wed on a weeknight at a Cincinnati-area Baptist church where her uncle was the minister. She wore the bridesmaid dress she’d worn for Darla’s wedding the year before. Fellow Miami player Johnny Swain was Charlie’s best man.

“We didn’t have a dime between us,” Dee Dee once said. “One of the coaches asked me if I was pregnant and I said, no, I was in love.”

That love was some of the glue that held them together through the address changes in Charlie’s coaching career and their major health issues from Dee Dee’s bouts with cancer to Charlie’s well-documented heart problems.

“We made it because we understood each other,” Charlie said as he began to chuckle. “I’ve always said, I could go out any time I wanted. I just had to follow three rules:

“I couldn’t dress up. I couldn’t take any money and ... I had to take the kids along.”

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