1952

On the 16th my maternal grandparents celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary. He will be 82 and she is 75. When I found out it was there anniversary I found myself wondering how many years it had been it seemed like eons since we had a 50 year celebration for them! 58 years. Wow. I pray they can celebrate many more together! My grandparents are quite the characters and I am positive there will only be more blog posts about them because I am going to be residing with them this fall!

Anyway we went for a short visit and came bearing pie-grandpas favorite thing in the world-for fathers day and it worked out perfectly that it was their anniversary. I naturally had all kinds of questions about their lives 58 years ago.

Grandma said that when she went home to her family and showed them her engagement right her dad told her “You better take care of that boy, he spent a lot of hard earned money on that ring.” :) Getting a ring was a pretty big deal. 58 years later I think she obeyed her fathers thought pretty well. Her mother never had a ring there wasn’t money for that type of luxury back then. My Grandma actually ended up buying her mother a wedding band later in life. She felt she deserved one.

At one point I asked Grandpa “Where did you go after the wedding?” Grandpa replied, “Home.” Plain as day. We all sat there and just laughed. You probably had to be there but just the way he said it was so funny. We continued our talk about their early days as married people and Grandma told us that her and Grandpa had lived in another part of the state in a tiny trailer. Grandpa was a brand inspector-he got a raise and made $175 a month. That was good money back then! He did some traveling for work. The very first time he left for business over night was also the first time Grandma had spent the night alone-ever. She went from her families home to Grandpa’s trailer. She went on to tell us how scared she was when it was time to go to bed and randomly mentioned, “I slept with a butcher knife under my pillow that night.” Oh Grandma. She was only 17. Holy moly she was only 17. Had her 1st baby by 20. Ok. I’m not planning on doing any of those things for quite some time!

Today, statically, 50% of all 1st marriages fail. And the stats for 2nd and 3rd marriages only get worse! We all could and should learn from our older generation. 58 years is amazing and I pray that when I do get around to marriage that it is as strong as the the examples I have in my family. I feel so blessed to have them to look up to.

Fyi...67% of 2nd marriages and 74% of 3rd marriages end in divorce. These stats are fascinating to me...not in a good way!

Blessings!