| Couple celebrates 70th wedding anniversary |
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| Wednesday, 16 September 2009 | ||
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Staff writer What started as a summer school relationship blossomed into a fruitful marriage that is going on 70 years.
They fed each other with wedding cake, which Trude Blake found out they did not even do at their own wedding. Blake is the activities coordinator for the Whispering Pines Assisted Living, Inc., which manages six other homes in Anoka in addition to the Andover home. Al and Audrey met at the Mechanics Arts school in St. Paul during summer school between their junior and senior years in high school. Al was a student at that school while Audrey attended Humboldt Senior High School in St. Paul. Al said the school board had decided that everybody needed to have a background in history in order to graduate high school, so many students took a summer history course. Audrey said there were between 40 and 50 students in their class. When Al and Audrey first met it was not love at first sight like you may imagine, but over the summer they gradually became acquainted. “We seemed to mesh together,” Audrey said. “I was looking for a pal,” Al said. After they graduated high school, they both enrolled at the University of Minnesota, but still lived at home on opposite ends of St. Paul. To get close to Audrey’s home, Al would take the street car, but he had to make sure to get back to his stop at midnight. Otherwise, he would have to wait until 1 a.m. to get a ride home. One time he almost missed the street car, but barely made it because he was sprinting as fast as he could. Another college-age man was doing the same and Al beat him to the street car. He later found out that this guy ran for the Hamline University track team. On some dates, they would sit on Audrey’s front porch and visit for hours. Other times, they would walk from the Mechanics Arts school to the business district in St. Paul. After years of courtship, they tied the knot in 1939. Their first two children were Nadine and Alvin Fred. They had their third child Lynn after Al got back from World War II. Al was a 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Army and on a warship somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on his way to Japan when the troops received the message that “the smoking lamp was lit.” At night during wartime, the ship’s lights were turned off and not even a match could be lit so the enemy would have a difficult time spotting them. Being able to turn on the lights and light their cigarettes meant the war was over. The ship docked in Yokohama, Japan, as part of the American occupation force after the war but had to fight through a typhoon on the way. After two-and-a-half-years in the Army, Al was sent home to Minnesota. Having three kids and wanting them to go to college, Al and Audrey wanted to be able to help them as much as possible, so they opened a general merchandise store in Ogilvie and moved into the living quarters above the store. While in Ogilvie, Al was a volunteer firefighter for 35 years. This was not the most ideal place to live for Audrey. She remembers the ceilings being so short, but they continued to live there for the entire 25 years they owned the business. After they got out of the general store business, they built a home in Dalbo and lived there until coming to the Cypress Manor assisted living home in Andover. Eric Hagen is at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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