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\u2019s long-ago admonition to the Ephesians: Never let the sun go down on your anger.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no problem too big we couldn\u2019t discuss it,\u201d Bill said, relaxing in the living room of the couple\u2019s Lower Macungie Township home and ticking off relationship lessons that could serve today\u2019s Valentine\u2019s Day couples well if they plan to build lives on foundations firmer than chocolate and roses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe never went to bed in all these years without saying good night and saying we love each other,\u201d Marie said. \u201cAnd the same thing every morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Nevilles\u2019 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 \u201cOooooh!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know where they would go to talk it out,\u201d Anne said, \u201cbut it was always peaceful.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The relationship started to deepen when Marie transferred into Bill\u2019s high school. Her own didn\u2019t offer Latin and she wanted to learn it because she aimed to go into nursing, her mother\u2019s profession.<\/p>\n
They spent more and more time together with \u201cthe gang from the five and dime,\u201d which is what they called Woolworth. Bill invited Marie to go skating and to the movies, though they didn\u2019t think of these get-togethers as dates, strictly speaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t really ask for dates. It just kind of happened,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In time, Marie left Woolworth and took an after-school job cooking at a restaurant.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I went to the restaurant after school every day, I got a piece of Boston cream pie,\u201d Bill said. \u201cThat was my incentive to stay with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
In time, love blossomed \u2014 though blossoms wither, so perhaps it\u2019s better to say it took root.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
After six years of courtship, they married Jan. 20, 1951, at St. Gertrude\u2019s Church in West Conshohocken.<\/p>\n
A little more than two weeks later, their lives abruptly \u2014 though not unexpectedly \u2014 changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cUncle Sam took him,\u201d Marie said. \u201cThe 6th of February, he was drafted.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He might have ended up in the Korean conflict but luck was with him. His mobile mapmaking unit was part of the Army\u2019s VII Corps, which was sent to Stuttgart, West Germany, in case the Soviet Union tried to advance into western Europe.<\/p>\n
That was in October 1951, Bill said, then pointed a thumb at Marie.<\/p>\n
\u201cGood old what\u2019s-her-name here couldn\u2019t do without me, so in December she followed me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t many housing options because Stuttgart, like the rest of the country, had been bombed to bits during World War II.<\/p>\n
Marie \u2014 unsurprisingly, given her personality \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
When they came home, Bill used the GI Bill to go to college and Marie embraced motherhood full time \u2014 though she also became the unpaid nurse of her neighborhood, patching up scrapes and sprains among the children.<\/p>\n
Later she would take a job at a nursing home in Lansdale and eventually become its administrator, a post she held for a decade.<\/p>\n
The work came to sadden her, though.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople would bring their parents in and never return,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s in-laws.<\/p>\n
Their bodies aren\u2019t nimble anymore but their minds remain so. Their memories are vivid and often funny.<\/p>\n
Bill told a story about taking a test at Drexel University, blanking on the proper term for the attraction between electrons and writing \u201clove of electrons\u201d as his answer.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t find a parking spot so I kept going,\u201d he said. \u201cI remembered that La Salle University was at 20th and Olney. I found a parking space and thought, \u2018This is for me.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 with CertainTeed in Valley Forge, Georgia-Pacific in Quakertown and other companies \u2014 but he grew disillusioned by the way corporations would merge or split and cause anxiety and tumult among employees.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think you\u2019re stable because it\u2019s a big, multinational corporation,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, if the working world didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFamily is No. 1,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Marie nodded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve preached that to the children and raised them that way,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd they\u2019re all doing the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill and Marie Neville sat down the other day to share some advice on how to keep a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,182,139,432],"class_list":["post-113931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}