February 12, 2004

Eight couples discuss keys to long, successful unions

Top photo from left: Charles and Ernestine Benning, Henry and Betty Coles, Paul and Betty Ford and Ted and Phyllis Jackson; lower photo: James and Catherine Smartt, Len and Nan Harshaw, George and Jeanette McDonald, and Leanora Brown. Not pictured, Orlando Brown.

How do you keep making a marriage work day after day, year after year, decade after decade? How do you stay married in an age of quick fixes, instant gratification and a sky-high divorce rate?

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, it behooves us to ask these questions of people who know what they’re talking about when they talk about love. Last Friday, the News sat down with eight couples from the Central Chapel AME Church who have all celebrated, or are about to celebrate, their golden wedding anniversary.

The couples were Paul and Betty Ford, married 54 years; Nan and Len Harshaw, 51 years; Ernestine and Charles Benning, 50 years this June; George and Jeannette McDonald, 56 years; Ted and Phyllis Jackson, 55 years; Henry and Betty Coles, 50 years; James and Catherine Smartt, 53 years; and Leanora Brown, married for 50 years to Orlando Brown, who was unable to attend.
Len Harshaw was 24 and home from college when he went to visit a friend in Springfield, where he grew up. For the first time, he met his friend’s sister, Nan, then 19, who was sitting on the porch. Len liked Nan from the start, but she wasn’t interested — she wanted to pursue her career.

Over the next two years they went on an occasional date but Nan remained focused on her career. But when her work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base required that she move to Pennsylvania, Len followed.

“He was very persistent,” Nan recalled. “He wore down my defenses.”
When Nan was 21 and Len 26, the two married. They have two children and eight grandchildren.

How do you make love last? By working at it each day. Even after five decades of living together, several couples agreed, you don’t take love for granted.

“Learning to accept each other goes on and on and on,” Nan Harshaw said. “We are opposites in personalities and have had a lot of adjusting to each other. Accepting each other as we are was a huge hurdle to overcome. We are still adjusting, still learning.”

Many nodded their heads in agreement at Harshaw’s statement. The ability of a husband and wife to accept each others’ likes and dislikes, their passions, their differences and, yes, their flaws — that sort of acceptance isn’t easy but it makes love grow, several said.

Family connections also figured into the courtship of Ted and Phyllis Jackson. In 1946 Phyllis went to visit a friend who lived in Mansfield, and met Ted, her friend’s brother. The two were married in 1948 and moved to Yellow Springs, where Phyllis grew up, the next year. They have two children and two grandchildren.

“Phyllis is really hot on history. When a person has a passion for something, you have to let her do it,” Ted Jackson said.

But Ted Jackson had his own passion, for the game of golf. His wife accepted his passion, he said, and didn’t complain when he worked on his game each Saturday and Sunday, leaving her alone to shepherd their children to church. Perhaps it was her acceptance of him that led Ted Jackson to come to his own realization that his love for golf might be harming his family.

“She didn’t hound me,” Jackson said. “But one day I woke up and realized, ‘This isn’t fair.’ ” From that moment on, he said, he stopped playing golf on weekends because it interfered with family togetherness.

That ability to put aside your own desires for the good of the other goes a long way toward making love last, several people in the group said.

“You compromise,” Len Harshaw said. “You listen and compromise.”
Staying married might have been harder, several said, if they hadn’t known each other so well when they married. All of the couples felt they had a deep understanding of their spouse when they married, gained in no small part from knowing their future spouses’ family members. Unlike many young people today, who have moved away from their hometown, most had stayed near family, and most families were large and ever-present. There were few secrets.

“When we came along we not only knew each other but we knew each other’s families,” said Betty Ford. Added Nan Harshaw, “There was not much we didn’t know about each other.”

A family connection also led to the meeting of Paul and Betty Ford. Paul, raised on a farm outside Xenia, came to Yellow Springs to see a friend, who was Betty’s cousin. At their first meeting, Paul, then 23 to Betty’s 22, admired the young woman’s feistiness.

“Betty was argumentative at our first encounter,” Paul said. “I said, ‘Get me a date with her.’ ”

The couple now has four children and five grandchildren.

Henry and Betty Coles may have known each other the longest of all the couples — they met in fifth grade in Columbia, S.C., where they both grew up. The two met again in high school, and began dating. They married in 1953 and have three children and two grandchildren.

The examples of their parents who were also married a long time helped to keep their own marriages working, said several. And high on the list of forces that helped them stay together was their Christian faith.

“We’re all Christian-born. We believe in the church,” said Phyllis Lawson. And several said their faith includes a respect for the sanctity of wedding vows.
“We were taught, ‘You give your word, you keep it.’ ” said Nan Harshaw. “That helps us weather hard times.”

Church played a prominent role in the courtship of Orlando and Leanora Brown. A college graduate stationed at an Army base in Kansas, Orlando, who had been raised to take his Christian faith seriously, often hung out at the home of one of the base chaplains, who happened to be Leanora’s father. When Orlando needed a date to a dance, he asked Leanora’s father if he could take her, even though she was just 16. But Leanora’s mother had a soft spot for Orlando, and the parents said yes.

“I liked her from the beginning,” Orlando said. “But she was just a youngster.”
Orlando was sent to Japan, then Korea, and Leanora went on to college, but the two stayed in touch. Four years after they met, Orlando asked Leanora’s father for permission to marry his daughter, and he said yes. The couple has three children.

Church also played a role in bringing together George and Jeannette McDonald, who were 18 and 17, respectively, when they met at a church function in Cleveland. Jeannette, who was from Yellow Springs, had gone to the city to visit friends, who “had something up their sleeves,” said Jeannette, who laughed at the memory of how the other girls arranged for George to walk Jeannette home. They clicked and were married in 1948 and moved here a year later. They have five children, nine grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Another secret to a successful marriage is to share favorite activities and spend time together, several couples agreed. But a marriage can also thrive when the spouses spend time apart, said others, including Ernestine Benning, who will celebrate the 50th anniversary of her marriage to Charles this June. Having different interests has led to mutual respect based on each person’s individuality, she said.

“When you can’t do things together you find things to do by yourself,” she said. “You make a life for yourself.”

Ernestine and Charles Benning were older — she was 25, he was 30 — already divorced with children when they met at Com’s restaurant in Yellow Springs in 1952. Ernestine lived in Springfield and worked at Antioch College and had come to town to visit her cousin, who knew Charles. The two began spending time together and two years later they married. Charles has three children and Ernestine has one, and together they have eight grandchildren.

James and Catherine Smartt were one of the few couples whose meeting had nothing to do with family connections. Rather, they met in a high school classroom in Swainsboro, Ga., where Catherine, who grew up in that town, was substitute teaching and James had just started as the new agriculture teacher. Not long after, James asked Catherine if he could visit her at her home. “Things took off from there,” Catherine said. The two, now married 53 years, have three children, three grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

The world was a very different place when they were young, all of the couples agreed. Young couples starting out in life, especially those raised in the church, didn’t even consider living together without getting married — they assumed they would be committed for life, and they were. And economic realities helped shape their marriages as well. Times were hard, expectations were low, no one had credit cards and a husband and wife had to pull together to support their family.
“You had to watch every penny you brought home. You had to talk to each other,” said Nan Harshaw. Said Leonora Brown, “You had to work as a team.”
All of these couples made it through those hard economic times, made it through raising young children, parenting teenagers, finding each other again after the children left home. They made it through many hard times, and new challenges loom on the horizon.

“Now,” Leonora Brown said, “we’re getting to the part about ‘in sickness and in health.’ ”

But they face the challenges of aging with their spouse by their side, and the deep comfort that comes from a long marriage.

“The biggest blessing,” Catherine Smartt said, “is that we’re still together after all these years.”

—Diane Chiddister