June 25 will be a very special day for an Eagle Hill couple.
On that day, Ken, 82, and Pat Reid, 79, will have been married for 50 years.
“It's been a good marriage,” Pat said during an interview with the Albertan.
Pat was divorced before she married Ken. She had two boys by that first marriage – Curtis and Chris, who were five and six years old at that time. Ken adopted them when they got married. About five years later, their daughter Angela was born.
“He liked to tell everybody after we started going together that he was just marrying me to get the boys,” Pat said with a laugh. “He loves kids.”
“It's ironic,” she said. “We lived six miles apart and I didn't meet him till just before my 30th birthday.”
When they met, Pat was working as a clerk at the Eagle Hill Co-op. She had started working there after her divorce.
“I was at home with my parents and my dad came home one day. He said, ‘I've got a job for you.' I didn't want to go because I was so embarrassed and ashamed of myself because I don't believe in divorce,” Pat said.
“He's a farmer. He just came in one day to get some gopher bed. That's what he called tobacco,” she said. “He was silly. He'd come in one day for gopher bed and the next day for penny matches and then the next day for some cigarette papers.”
“Well, I had to make an excuse to go to the store, right? And she didn't catch on,” Ken said. “The hayloft is still full of tobacco packages.”
Ken doesn't smoke anymore. He quit when he and Pat got married.
One thing that impressed Pat was the fact that Ken would occasionally come by the store riding a bull as he led his 70 cows from one quarter to his farm.
Ken was asked if there was something that made Pat attractive to him.
“She didn't throw up when she saw me,” he said, prompting a laugh from Pat.
“He tells me every time he used to ask a girl out they'd just throw up. I don't believe it for a minute,” she said.
“She just looked sad and lonely; she might like a poor old farmer like me,” Ken added with a smile.
Pat says she found Ken to be very attractive.
“He looked real nice, I'll tell you, even if he did have striped overalls always dripping on the floor,” she said.
“I wore those coveralls all the time. I was always out in the snow and there'd be ice up to there and I'd come in the store drip, drip, drip,” he said with a light laugh.
Ken remembers one special day during their courtship.
“I went to a funeral one day and I stopped in at the store on the way back. She took one look at me and disappeared. I thought, ‘well that's it, she can't stand me,'” he said.
“That isn't what it was at all,” Pat said. “I saw him all dressed up and I didn't want him to think I was staring at him, so I went around the corner so I could look. He was all dressed up, he wasn't in his coveralls, and he looked real nice.”
Ken and Pat's courtship was going well.
Suddenly, it seemed to be progressing faster than either of them knew.
“One day, somebody was getting married. There was a neighbour in the store. He was talking to the manager and he said, ‘I hear somebody's getting married in the spring,'” Pat recalled.
“We both looked at each other,” Ken said.
“Kenny backed up,” Pat said. “He caught his foot on the ledge of the door and fell out the door. Didn't get hurt, thank goodness.”
“It wasn't us – it was somebody else that was engaged.”
Pat says it was about three months between the time of the proposal and the wedding.
“When we got engaged I said, ‘when should our wedding date be?' He said, ‘well, pick a date between calving and haying,'” Pat said with a laugh.
“His mother had a lady over here visiting with her. She said when we got engaged, ‘well, that won't last six weeks.' Well, here we are, nearly 50 years,” Pat said. “I think they figured it wouldn't last because I had a bad marriage the first time. He was abusive, mean and unfaithful.”
The year after they got married, Pat won a trip to Hawaii.
“I was working at the store. The manager was sitting there throwing stuff in the garbage and I thought, ‘what in the world?' They were entry forms for a contest to win a trip to Hawaii. So I picked out six, filled 'em out, mailed them separately, and I won. That was 1967. I even got a free hairdo that went with the trip,” Pat said.
“Times have changed from then,” Ken said.
“Yeah, we don't look the same anymore,” Pat said. “He even had dark hair back then.”
Over the years, the Reids have each suffered some health issues – including a double bypass for Ken. But they haven't let that stop them, and they've stayed together.
They were asked what the secret is to a good, long marriage.
“Faith in God and a good sense of humour,” Pat replied.
“We don't fight,” she said. “We never have.”
"We don't fight. We never have."PAT REID
