I haven’t blogged for over a week, largely because of computer problems, but also because I was out of town. I was back home, in Bloomington Indiana, celebrating my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. We had a lovely time, culminating in a big party, with singing (including numbers by my brother’s talented kids), and also a tribute by, uh, me. And I rather thought that I would publish that tribute, and do it here. So here goes:
“In many respects, the most remarkable thing about my parents’ 60 year partnership is that they ever met at all. My Dad wrote once that they were brought together by Adolf Hitler, and by a brutal murder, and there’s honestly a lot of truth to that. Imagine this:
Mary Lou Thorne, daughter of a Salt Lake grocer, became a nurse, and lived and worked in Salt Lake City. She never married.
Roy Samuelsen went to sea at 15, and was a popular member of the Norwegian merchant marine fleet. His singing delighted his fellow sailors. Eventually, he retired to Moss, Norway, and worked for years in the glass factory there. He never married.
It’s easy enough to construct alternate life histories for them both, in which they lived more or less happy, but entirely separate lives, with an ocean and continent, not to mention language, culture and nationalities, keeping them apart. Eternally and finally apart. And alone.
Because what I find myself unable to do is to imagine either of them marrying someone else. This is, of course, in part because of my innate prejudice towards my own existence on this planet. But they seem so peculiarly well-suited to each other. They are people of complementing strengths, perfectly balanced, leaning together like the support legs of the Eiffel Tower.
And they’ve continued to grow together, adjoining giant timbers in a forest. Dad: bluff and hearty. Mom: more contemplative, though in fact my father has grown introspective in recent years. They are not today the people they were 60 years ago. They’re refined the parts of themselves that most rely on the other. They are, singularly, a pair.
And it was indeed the brute forces of world and local history that drove them together. The ravages of Hitler’s occupation of Norway drove my grandparents, post-war, to the unimaginable step of leaving Moss, and coming to, of all places, Provo, Utah. The murder of Harold Thorne, salesman and prospective grocer, drove my grandmother, Lucile Thorne, to the home of her mother, Mary Markham, teaching school in Provo, Utah. Youthful boy-craziness led to the final step, my Mom and her friends’ decision to join my Dad’s Scout troup on a trek up the mountains, crashing a camping party. (And whenever my Mom would tell me the story of that Scout hike, she had an expression on her face that admitted to a teenage rebellious naughtiness for which she wasn’t, in retrospect, even a bit repentant).
My Mom wasn’t ordinarily a party girl, however. She was a bookworm, a scholastic over-achiever. Dad was an entertainer, probably intriguingly foreign with his Norwegian accent, with some modest skill on the guitar, a love of American folk songs and cowboy movies, and a voice like spun velvet. They clicked, pretty much immediately.
And so, after his army stint in Germany, Mom and Dad were married, in the Salt Lake Temple, on May 25, 1955.
May 25. I took the liberty of looking up that date on the internet. Sixty years ago, on May 25, the biggest news was the first ascent of Mount Kangjenjunge, the third highest mountain on Earth. A tornado clobbered Udall Kansas, and a crazed fan broke into the home of Frank Sinatra, because he’d written a song he hoped that Frank would record. On the radio, hits included Mitch Miller’s recording of The Yellow Rose of Texas, and Bill Hays singing The Ballad of Davy Crockett. But number one, in May of that year, was Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock. My Dad won’t appreciate me saying this, but it’s true: my parents’ marriage and rock and roll both turn sixty this year.
Sixty years. I’m enough Hoosier to look up the basketball results, and saw that the Philadelphia Warriors won the 1955 NBA championship. That same franchise, transplanted to Oakland, plays for the same championship now. The Warriors defeated the team from Fort Wayne Indiana, run by a Hoosier businessman named Fred Zollner, who built car pistons. Hence the team’s name: not the Fort Wayne Pistons, but the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons. That team’s star player was Mormon royalty; Mel Hutchins, from BYU, whose sister, Colleen, had three years earlier been named Miss America. My Dad once told me privately that in his opinion, my Mom was a lot prettier than Colleen Hutchins.
Meanwhile, my newly married Dad had a job in Joe Creer’s sheet metal shop. And I suppose somewhere in the back of his mind, he may have hoped that maybe, the music classes he was taking at BYU might, possibly, turn into something more. The dream of an opera career must have beckoned, as a fantasy, all the while he worked construction. I suspect that neither he or my Mom had ever so much as heard the word “Hoosier.”
1955. And in the future, Wagner and Puccini and Verdi, concerts for kings and princes, New York City Opera and the Boston Lyric and Houston Opera, a life spent projecting that voice, that astounding voice, over full orchestras.
And Mom there for all of it, while, fully independent, pursuing her own career as an astoundingly innovative school teacher.
How did they do it, how did they pull it off? Separate careers, lives always together, each of them the other’s biggest fan? Not just sixty years together, but sixty years together, unified, united.
Almost everything I can think of to describe it comes across as banal, clichéd, banal.
‘They never fought.’ Today, they insist they rarely did. That’s a tribute to their unity; their marital disagreements have become, over time, forgotten and unimportant, trivial. But they were, and are, tough, independent people; of course they had some corkers. I remember being the intermediary a couple of times: “Eric, please tell your father. . . ” “Eric, please inform your mother. . . .”
‘They worked hard.’ We tell young people this, that marriage is hard work, and I suppose it is. But what I mostly remember was a whole lot of fun. I remember the laughter, the bad jokes, the puns, the goofy songs and long board games. Marriage is work. If it’s not also fun, why put the time in?
‘The gospel united them.’ And it did, of course it did, in a hundred different ways. I hope the Lord will forgive me if I say that the foundation of our family was much more about basketball than the Bible, much more playing catch than piety, much more about waterskiing than worship. We were a camping, hiking, boating bunch. And every summer, we’d take a family vacation together, and every summer, a car or boat would break down, and we’d have to improvise. We got darned good at it.
And Mom. . . .
Mom found the right balance, always. She was a lady, entirely feminine, in a family of boys, and somehow, she handled it. She loved waterskiing as much as the rest of us, but she did it her way. She didn’t want to muss her hair, and would carefully lower herself into the lake, ski with evident enjoyment, then drop the skis and allow herself to settle into the water, hairdo intact. And we’d help her aboard.
Let me finish with that image, Mom skiing with delicacy and daintiness. That signified her accommodation to her reality. And my brothers and I profited from both feminine and masculine tropes; books and learning and culture AND nature and competition and aggression, both from them both. Because my Dad’s world was grand opera, and don’t make the mistake of doubting the sensitive artistry of his use of his vocal instrument. Or my Mom’s competitive nature, or the steely strength of her will.
Both worlds, both sets of values, from both parents. And now, in the twilight of their shared life and love, what’s left is iron. Iron wills, iron commitment, iron convictions, iron strength.
For sixty years together, 3 children, lucky 13 grandchildren, I give you life well mastered, lives well lived.
Roy and Mary Samuelsen
Mom and Dad.