75 Years Together
-by Pat Archibald -
As Valentine's Day falls in February we wanted to find a special couple to help us celebrate the holiday of loving relationships, and we found the perfect couple!
Art and Lenore Morris, of Vernon, have just recently celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary, a milestone very, very few people will ever meet.
I recently spent a wonderful hour visiting with them in their Vernon home, where they still maintain their rose garden and their vegetables. Art is now 94 and Lenore is 91, but they still hold strong opinions on the events of the day, and are looking forward to the warm months of summer.
Art, from Saskatchewan, and Lenore, from America met in the most unlikely of places - Horsefly. They met at a dance and Lenore says that they spent the next 75 years dancing. They continued to enjoy it until knee troubles in the last year kept them off the dance floor.
All those years ago, in Horsefly, Art had signed up to stay through the winter months to care for the cattle on the local ranch. In return for working seven days a week, twelve hours a day, he was paid $50 per month. He was provided with a cabin of sorts and a "trap line grubstake". That old expression means that they were sent into the bush with beans, rice and one box of apples. The apples were kept in the root cellar under the cabin floor. I asked Lenore if it didn't get bitterly cold in the cabin, but she said the place was so small it was easy to keep it warm! When they decided, in 1928, to marry, this was their honeymoon. Well, when you're only 16 and 19 years old you do these crazy things!
Each day through the winter Art had to take the horses two miles to the hay barn and come back with enough hay for the 180 head of cattle. They had to keep breaking the ice in the creek so the cattle could drink , and that, they said, was really hard.
One winter was enough, and they left Horsefly for Victoria and later Winfield, where they lived for almost fifty years.
They tell me they have worked hard all their lives, but they also have a lifetime of good memories. Lenore laughs about 22 trips to Reno, and never coming home with less than she set off with.
At their recent celebration, held at the Schubert Centre on November 9,2003, they received beautiful cards of congratulations from the Queen, the Governor General, the Prime Minister, and many others. Congratulations richly deserved by these two wonderful pioneers. |
