If you ask Clark and Jean McHuron how they met, you’ll get two different stories.
“She claims that she came and stayed with my sister Helen, who passed away at 12,” Clark said. “She was in bed during that time, and Jean says she would come and play with her. I don’t remember Jean in that situation at all. She claims I threw snowballs at her. I deny that.”
Clark remembers meeting Jean later, when the two were older.
“I do remember that I had to chase off all of her suitors,” he said. “It wasn’t easy, but I was successful. She was a popular gal.”
The two grew up just a few houses apart on Chestnut Street in the village of North Syracuse during the Great Depression. They married on Feb. 28, 1942. At the end of this month, the pair will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary.
So how does a couple, even one in which the husband and wife have known each other since childhood, stay married for seven decades?
“She frequently says I traveled a lot. Take that any way you want,” Clark said. “She gets a chuckle out of it, whoever she tells it to.”
Jokes aside, the secret to a long and happy marriage is no surprise: it’s love.
“We really love each other,” Jean always says, according to her daughter, Marjean Marciniak.
“She’s a very loving person,” Clark said of his wife, who wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t be interviewed for this story. “If you ask her what she’s up to or how she feels, she’ll turn the conversation around within a few sentences so that the focus is back on you. She’s always doing that.”
Clark said he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he knew Jean was The One.
“There isn’t an answer that I know of,” he said. “It wasn’t all of a sudden, boom! She was just… it.”
In the last 70 years, the couple has had four children (three boys and a girl), lived in such varied places as North Syracuse, Alaska, Washington state and California and traveled to New Zealand. Clark worked as a geologist while Jean taught, cared for the children and undertook various volunteer projects, including an extensive effort to create and distribute teaching tools for the visually impaired worldwide.
“She’s always looking out to help somebody somewhere,” Clark said. “She’s a very intelligent gal. I liked that. I figured that would take care of my part, bolster me up. I think some of it rubbed off.”
Now in their 90s, the McHurons have settled in the Pacific Northwest. They have eight grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. They remain active in their community.
“We’ve had a good life together,” Clark said. “That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a bump here or there. There was the time I wrote a check for trip around the world, which was $2,500 back then, and forgot to put in the checkbook. Bank of America called up, and said, ‘Jean, he’s done it again.’ That upset things tremendously. Of course, that’s when banking was a lot better, more personal. You’d never get that nowadays.”
Despite the tough times, Clark said he wouldn’t change a thing.
“I wouldn’t do a thing different,” he said. “Sure, maybe there are some things that should have been done differently, but we don’t dwell on them. We’ve traveled well beyond them.”
Though this is a milestone anniversary, Clark and Jean won’t be commemorating the occasion with a big celebration.
“We’ve had many anniversary parties in this family,” Clark said. “This year, she decided she’d just as soon stay here and read the memoirs the kids and the relatives wrote about us instead of having a bash. She’d rather not have a get-together that required a big to-do when she could just read them right off the bat. That’s pretty much Jean right there.”
