It couldn’t have looked that promising on May 1, 1937.
Even their first meeting brought mixed reactions. Appropriately, that meeting was at Virginia’s home church. Berton returned to lunch with the “cousins” he was visiting – actually the family of his mother’s first husband with whom she remained close even after he died. He told them he had met the woman he would marry. She gave a different report at her family dinner table saying she had met the ugliest man she had ever seen.
At 26, he had one year of college with a life goal of pastoring country churches. His visual handicap with no depth perception prevented his driving a car or studying for long periods of time. His parents were both already dead. When they were alive, his family was dysfunctional, leaving him without a model of family life.
At 24, she was five months short of being an official “old maid” by the standards of the day. She also had one year of college with no hope for a second after the Great Depression came. She lived with her grandmother and worked a WPA job.
They did have some things going for them. He had developed a fine-tuned sense of humor, probably to deal with his ongoing family problems. She enjoyed driving a car and drove like a pro. Both had a vision of sharing the joys and sorrows of the people in country church congregations.
On May 1, 1937, they took on an uncertain future in the home of their pastor with his wife and her brother as witnesses.
They would indeed spend their lives in those country churches. He would graduate from Mississippi College, and she would go on to get about three years of college. Both would teach school to supplement income from time to time. They would raise four girls who all went into education, none in the same field but each in the area where they fit.
Their girls remembered in a recent visit. There never was a lot of money floating around, but other riches were abundant. Favorite memories included Daddy’s ability to find a groaner pun in any given situation and his penchant for never using a little word when a grandiose one would do. We marveled at Mama’s ability to take one pattern that was about the right size, alter it to fit whichever girl she was sewing for, and add a creative touch we had seen in a magazine. We felt well-dressed in her creations from the printed feed sacks the neighboring dairy farmer saved for her.
They spent almost forty-five years making a life together. Daddy liked to sum it up, “My wife drives me everywhere we go,” and would wait until his listener got the joke. Eighty-seven years later on this anniversary, I am grateful for the courage they had to face that unpromising future.