Sean C. Morgan
Family and friends joined Wanda and Ed McCartin Saturday, May 6, in celebrating their 75th year of marriage.
Gary Linkel of Sweet Home picked up the couple with his 1931 Ford Model A at Wiley Creek Community where they live and transported them to Community Chapel where family and friends awaited and their son Mark McCartin is pastor.
In a short program, Pastor McCartin said that William Edwin McCartin, born April 10, 1922, and Wanda June Smith, born Jan. 9, 1925, were married May 9, 1942.
McCartin asked his parents what the secret to such a long marriage is.
“I’m still working on it,” Ed said.
“Sometimes it was really good,” Wanda said. “Sometimes, it was really rough, but we never in all our life went to bed mad.”
“They met actually in church,” Mark McCartin said. “My mother would go to a Pentecostal church Sunday nights.”
It was the same church McCartin’s grandmother on his father’s side attended. She told Ed that there were a couple of cute girls, including Wanda, who had been attending the church there.
He took a friend to church to check out the ladies, McCartin said. As it turned out, his younger brother, Donald, ended up marrying one of them, Elma. Ed started courting Wanda.
After five months, Ed and Wanda obtained a marriage license, surprised their parents and eloped in Resterstow, Md.
“Shortly thereafter, they conceived my oldest brother, Bill,” Mark McCartin said.
Soon, Ed was drafted into the U.S. Army. While waiting in Virginia – just 80 miles from home – to ship out to north Africa for the invasion of Italy, his first son was born. Ed wouldn’t see him for 2½ years. His mother worked in a factory during World War II.
When he returned to the United States after the war, the McCartins had three more boys. Ed became a Christian in 1950. He went to Bible school in Wisconsin.
Certified as a pastor in August 1955, he returned to the Baltimore, Md., area where he served as a church minister.
As they continued to have children in hopes of having a daughter, three more sons were born.
In search of drier air to address a health issue, Ed and the five youngest boys moved to Albuquerque, N.M., where they lived for about a year. From there, they moved to California.
After leaving Baltimore, Ed continued to serve in the ministry as an associate pastor.
He also held different jobs, including driving a potato chip truck and as a quality control worker in a fabrication and paint shop.
Wanda worked in manufacturing for Hughes Aircraft helping build Triton missiles.
Retired, they moved to Sweet Home in 1992, where their sons Mark and Dean lived.
Their sons are Bill, Dennis, Eric, Jerry, Dean, Mark and Tim. They have 23 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren with “buns in the oven,” Mark McCartin said.