Annual Old Book Sale brings back memories, causes reflection

You might say Lee and Jennifer O’Kelley have enjoyed a storybook romance.

Well, that may be a bit of a stretch. But there’s certainly a story between the lines of how they met and fell in love.

They tied the knot on Dec. 16, 1999 – two weeks before the world was supposed to end. Remember Y2K? The detonation switch never got pulled. And the O’Kelleys returned from their honeymoon at Disney World to live happily ever after.

Still, it might never have happened had it not been for the annual Friends of the Library Old Book Sale. Macon’s largest literary yard sale has always been a matchmaker in itself – bringing together thousands of books with thousands of book lovers.

For the O’Kelleys, this yearly celebration of dog-eared pages and fading Dewey Decimal numbers was indirectly responsible for their nuptials.

The old book sale renews itself for the 49th time beginning this Thursday at Central City Park, so we are closing in on a half century of bookmarks.

This is one of them.

If this was the “perfect” storybook romance, I might tell you about how Jennifer and Lee’s eyes met while perusing the spines of Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte. Or that they started flirting across a table of paperback novels. Or that their hands touched while reaching for the same copy of “Gone With the Wind,’’ which is Jennifer’s all-time favorite book.

But none of that happened. (And, no, they didn’t meet on bookloversonly.com)

They weren’t even at the book sale when the initial round of Cupid’s arrow-slinging began back in 1994.

It all came together, though, like pages at a book binder, when the old Westgate Mall was still alive and well. (Built in 1961, it was the first enclosed mall in Georgia.)

As a little girl, Jennifer would attend the Old Book Sale with her father, Tom Stevens. She was fascinated with how the tables fanned out in all directions from the center of the mall, a wall-to-wall bookfest.

“My daddy would take me to the book sale, and our neighbors, Karen and Bill Shockley, would take me to the library,” Jennifer said. “I was raised in the library’s summer reading program.”

Years later, she worked as an account manager at Westgate’s Burlington Coat Factory, so she watched first-hand as the book sale grew larger each year to become one of the finest in the state.

She wasn’t with her father the day he ran into one of her classmates from Central High School. They were chatting, and Stevens told the friend Jennifer was recently divorced, living in Byron and working at a store at the Peach Outlet.

The friend later contacted Jennifer and told her she had someone she wanted her to meet. She invited her to a cookout at her house on Corbin Avenue.

“I had only been divorced a year, so I wasn’t sure about dating again,” Jennifer said. “I had started dating my ex-husband when I was 14 and got married when I was 18. So, I had never dated anybody else. A blind date scared me. When I was driving from Byron, I kept asking myself if I wanted to go through with this.”

To make matters even more nerve-racking, she ended up at the wrong house. Fortunately, she knocked on the door of her old principal, Jim Littlefield, from Springdale Elementary, who pointed her in the right direction.

“But I came real close to backing out of that driveway and going back to Byron,” she said.

Lee O’Kelley had also been married before and was 10 years older than Jennifer. When he was a teenager, he lost both parents to cancer a few months apart. His father was a veterinarian at Friendship Animal Hospital on Gray Highway.

From the beginning, there was enough common ground for Lee to start courting her. He had to overlook her calling him by the wrong name on their first date. “Lee O’Kelley … I thought his name was Leo,” she said, laughing.

They dated for five years before they were married at the courthouse by the late Judge Taylor Phillips. They now live in the house where Lee grew up, and Jennifer handles the business side of the roof repair business he started in 1982. Customers always get a kick out of the advertisement the O’Kelleys run regularly in The Telegraph. It lists Lee as the “Owner” and Jennifer as the “Boss.”

She has remained an avid reader. She even keeps a dictionary by her bed. She loves books on history and writing. She is perhaps more well-known for a suitcase than a bookcase. She has given several storytelling lectures about an old, black suitcase full of 19th-century letters she once found in the basement of her Macon home.

Every time the giant book fair rolls around to raise money for Middle Georgia libraries, Jennifer allows herself a time to reflect on all the chapters in her life that have been written as the result of it.

“I wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for the Old Book Sale,” she said. “I don’t know where I would be, but I like where I am.”

This story was originally published February 24, 2017 at 5:59 PM with the headline "Annual Old Book Sale brings back memories, causes reflection."