Bill and Marie Neville sat down the other day to share some advice on how to keep a marriage going for 75 years, the way they have, and it boiled down to St. Paul’s long-ago admonition to the Ephesians: Never let the sun go down on your anger.
“There was no problem too big we couldn’t discuss it,” Bill said, relaxing in the living room of the couple’s Lower Macungie Township home and ticking off relationship lessons that could serve today’s Valentine’s Day couples well if they plan to build lives on foundations firmer than chocolate and roses.
“We never went to bed in all these years without saying good night and saying we love each other,” Marie said. “And the same thing every morning.”
The Nevilles’ daughter, Anne, listening to these instructions on the care and feeding of romance, briefly interjected to say she and her two brothers, Bill and Jim, never once heard their parents shout. The only sign of trouble brewing was that Marie now and again would turn her head away as her husband tried to kiss her, prompting the Greek chorus of onlooking Neville children to say “Oooooh!”
“I don’t know where they would go to talk it out,” Anne said, “but it was always peaceful.”
The Nevilles, both 96, celebrated their 75th anniversary Jan. 20, welcoming the usual army of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that shows up for holidays and other occasions.
The crowd at Christmas, for example, numbered 29, all of them happily orbiting the binary star at the center of the house: Bill, an Army veteran who spent a lifetime in engineering, sales and management; and Marie, whose background in nursing shines through in the way she speaks of love as a patient nourished and sustained by a gentle touch.
They met when Bill turned 15, got his working papers and went to the Woolworth store in Norristown, Montgomery County, to apply for a job. Marie was already working there, selling buttons, thread, pins, thimbles and other sewing knick-knacks at what used to be called the notions counter.
Love at first sight? Not exactly. It was more of a slow reckoning that would lead to an epiphany. They were only in their mid-teens so that was probably for the best.
The relationship started to deepen when Marie transferred into Bill’s high school. Her own didn’t offer Latin and she wanted to learn it because she aimed to go into nursing, her mother’s profession.
They spent more and more time together with “the gang from the five and dime,” which is what they called Woolworth. Bill invited Marie to go skating and to the movies, though they didn’t think of these get-togethers as dates, strictly speaking.
“We didn’t really ask for dates. It just kind of happened,” he said.
In time, Marie left Woolworth and took an after-school job cooking at a restaurant.
“If I went to the restaurant after school every day, I got a piece of Boston cream pie,” Bill said. “That was my incentive to stay with her.”
In time, love blossomed — though blossoms wither, so perhaps it’s better to say it took root.
After high school, Marie entered nursing school in Bryn Mawr, where she earned a degree. Bill went to work for a steel company in Conshohocken, beginning as a file clerk but quickly rising to draftsman, making technical drawings.
After six years of courtship, they married Jan. 20, 1951, at St. Gertrude’s Church in West Conshohocken.
A little more than two weeks later, their lives abruptly — though not unexpectedly — changed.
“Uncle Sam took him,” Marie said. “The 6th of February, he was drafted.”
Bill entered the Army. Because of his experience as a draftsman, he was sent to cartography school and became a mapmaker for the Army Corps of Engineers.
He might have ended up in the Korean conflict but luck was with him. His mobile mapmaking unit was part of the Army’s VII Corps, which was sent to Stuttgart, West Germany, in case the Soviet Union tried to advance into western Europe.
That was in October 1951, Bill said, then pointed a thumb at Marie.
“Good old what’s-her-name here couldn’t do without me, so in December she followed me,” he said.
Before Bill got permission to live with Marie off base, she lived alone in a bombed-out house in Stuttgart with no heat and no stove. There weren’t many housing options because Stuttgart, like the rest of the country, had been bombed to bits during World War II.
Marie — unsurprisingly, given her personality — quickly made friends, one of whom helped her find better lodgings. Bill moved in and they finished his one-year tour in comparative comfort before coming home.
The relationships they forged in Germany survived the distance; the Nevilles have been back to Germany a number of times and are in touch to this day with the children and grandchildren of their old friends.
When they came home, Bill used the GI Bill to go to college and Marie embraced motherhood full time — though she also became the unpaid nurse of her neighborhood, patching up scrapes and sprains among the children.
Later she would take a job at a nursing home in Lansdale and eventually become its administrator, a post she held for a decade.
The work came to sadden her, though.
“People would bring their parents in and never return,” she said.
The Nevilles lived in Hatfield, Montgomery County, for years, then moved to a home in the Poconos. As they grew older, they decided to find a place closer to their children, and ended up in the same Lower Macungie Township development as their son Bill’s in-laws.
Their bodies aren’t nimble anymore but their minds remain so. Their memories are vivid and often funny.
Bill told a story about taking a test at Drexel University, blanking on the proper term for the attraction between electrons and writing “love of electrons” as his answer.
He didn’t like the teasing he got from the professor, so he hopped in his car and drove to Temple University with the intention of enrolling there.
“I didn’t find a parking spot so I kept going,” he said. “I remembered that La Salle University was at 20th and Olney. I found a parking space and thought, ‘This is for me.’ “
Seems like as good a way as any to pick a school. It worked out for the Nevilles, anyway. Bill held a number of jobs over the years — with CertainTeed in Valley Forge, Georgia-Pacific in Quakertown and other companies — but he grew disillusioned by the way corporations would merge or split and cause anxiety and tumult among employees.
“You think you’re stable because it’s a big, multinational corporation,” he said. “You’re not.”
Still, if the working world didn’t provide stability, the woman beside him did. So did the children, and their children, and their children. Not every couple gets to witness so many branches grow from the family tree.
“Family is No. 1,” Bill said, with the tone of someone who could marshal incontrovertible evidence at the snap of his fingers should anyone try to debate the point.
Marie nodded.
“We’ve preached that to the children and raised them that way,” she said. “And they’re all doing the same.”
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.