Note: In August, we asked Facebook friends for their memories of CB radios. This story is one of our favorites:

Sweetness and Little Mule would talk for hours on the CB. Silly stuff, mostly: homework, family, after-school jobs.

“What did we talk about? Anything and everything, people we knew, everything,” recalls Mike Krumrine (“Little Mule”).

“Back then, things went slower. We really got to know each other,” says Jill Groomes (“Sweetness”).

Though they did not know each other’s real names, they were part of a loose-knit group of high school friends in rural northeast Maryland in the late ‘80s. In the days before cellphones, they used their CBs to spread the word about parties and who was going to the movies and where to meet up afterward.

Sweetness and Little Mule bumped into each other on the airwaves and liked the sound of each other’s voice. Soon, one couldn’t go on the air without checking to see if the other was there. They began scheduling their talks, dropping down from Channel 19 to Channel 2 for a little privacy and to avoid conversation-crashing friends, who urged them to just go on a date already. Still no real names, just handles.

Unbeknownst to Jill and Mike, they had met before. She had once yelled at him for letting his puppy run around loose in a busy parking lot. “I really didn’t like him,” Jill recalled.

She was a country girl and a good student and he was a headbanger with long hair, their cliques so separate that they never knew each other at North Carroll High in Hampstead, Md., where they were a year apart. On the CB, though, it was easy to overlook differences and uncover the similarities.

After six months of being nothing but Sweetness and Little Mule to each other, they agreed to go on that date. And when they did, they recognized each other from the encounter in the parking lot, but all the things that might have kept them apart – background, appearance, cliques – didn’t, because they already knew each other, knew each other well enough to know that other stuff didn’t matter.

“Once we were together, we were always together,” Jill says.

The Krumrines have been married 25 years now and live in York, Pa. She is a retired nurse. He is a contractor, who still listens to metal and rides a Harley. They have a daughter and two grandsons.

“I’m the luckiest man in the world,” Mike says. “I couldn’t ask for a better partner or a better friend. The good Lord blessed me with a good woman.”

Mike is on the road a lot, installing sunrooms in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and he still keeps a CB under his dash. Jill has one, too.

Sweetness and Little Mule are still talking.