#61? Seems like yesterday by GJ

There are people who say that 61 years of marriage is rare today. Maybe it is. I never really know how to deal with such statistics, but it sure looks like fewer people marry and more people marry more than once. Statistics aside, I think it's a matter of the times we live in. If someone were to ask me how we did it, I'd probably answer it with a little tongue in cheek.

Don't get married too young, like we did. (I was 20 and 1/2, Jean was almost 18.) Don't quit school, like we did. (I at end of junior year, she in mid-senior year.) (Now, don't jump to any conclusions, like Jean's parents probably did!) Don't marry without a job, without any money, and without any marketable skills, like we did. Don't marry if you come from different faiths, or ethnic backgrounds, of course. And, wait until you have a home to go to after the wedding!

If you are a woman, make sure the man doesn't want to move a lot, knows what occupation he would like, and has some goals. (We have moved so many times that Jean is always afraid I'll tell how many!) Yet, she agreed to them at the time, bless her heart, worked like a trooper to make the moves go smoothly, and once made sure we were settled enough to have company the very evening we moved into a new house! Jean also was patient with me as I struggled through a series of jobs (8 or 10 in 18 months, before waking up to need for college.)

In a nutshell, I think there is evidence that our particular secret was that we grew up together! Sure, it meant learning many, many lessons the hard way. (Like, how to survive a week or two on unemployment benefits, and how to survive the two weeks before the first check on a new job, etc.) (I really had to learn how to work with a variety of bosses. The navy taught me to obey, but most bosses had poor methods of giving orders. No officer ever treated me like an idiot.) We were ignorant and naive about many things and had to "bump into" the others head-on. Somehow, through it all, we never, ever, gave the other any reason to doubt our undying love for each other. It is a 61-year-old given.

Now, about Jean's parents. It's too long a story to go into detail, so read between the lines. I was in navy electronics school, summer of 1947. Jean was back in Chicago to see her sister. We were seeing each other week-ends. I was pleading to get married, she wanted to wait until she went back to California to finish senior year. Finally, to appease me, she wrote and asked for their permission, positive that they'd never consent. But...they did! So, we married. Many years later, and I mean 50 or so as we were reminiscing, it dawned on us, "Do you suppose they thought that we had to...?" (Donna was born 14 months later just to show them how wrong they were, by golly.) That was, indeed, another era, wasn't it.