Gene Way puts it bluntly: “I guess all marriages that last this long are unusual.”
Gene and his wife Ora Belle, both 88, celebrated their 70th anniversary Saturday, June 25, with a family celebration at their grandson’s place in Junction City.
Really, their relationship began almost 80 years ago, Gene said.
They met when they were both 9.
“Nine years later, we got married,” he said.
Gene was born July 14, 1928 in Porterville, Calif. His family headed north when he was 9, settling in the small northern California town of Willits.
Ora Belle was born two weeks later, to William and Nancy Funk, on July 31, 1928 in Foster. Her father was a local ranch hand, working in the valley now occupied by Foster and Green Peter dams.
“I don’t know if I was born at the hospital or on the ranch where my dad worked,” she said. When she was “quite small,” her family moved to Willits in the early 1930s.
Technically, she said, the Great Depression was supposed to be over, but it hadn’t ended yet for her family.
Her parents built a house next to the one that Gene’s family moved into.
When the war broke out, Gene got his dad to sign on the dotted line so he could enlist the Merchant Marine when he was 16.
“I quit school. She went on and graduated,” he said.
Gene traveled through the Philippines, Okinawa, “the hot spots” during the war, he said. “We went in with cargo when MacArthur re-entered the Philippines” in 1944.
He wound up in Japan after the war, where his ship carried troops from Maui, Hawaii, where they had been on “R&R” following the dropping of the atomic bombs.
They married on June 9, 1946, following the war’s end, and settled in Willits.
Gene worked 16 years as a chief engineer in hospitals.
“I qualified for my contractor’s license because of my experience in the Merchant Marine,” he said.
They later moved to Redmond, then to Brookings, where Gene ran a sun room and patio coverings business – “anything under glass” – for 14 years.
They had three children: David, who is now an electronics engineer in the aerospace industry in San Jose, Calif.; Mary Ann, who lives with her parents in Sweet Home; and Don, who is deceased. They have nine grandchildren and 21 great-grandkids.
The Ways moved to Sweet Home in 2003, moving into a house in Foster which, Gene said, they had purchased as an investment.
“He’s been working on it ever since,” Ora Belle noted.
They’ve also done a lot of traveling since Gene’s retirement, visiting most of the western states and spending winters in Arizona until the last three years. More recently, Ora Belle said, they have visited the coast frequently with their trailer.
David, who is about to retire, said they might resume those trips to the desert – together.
That would be OK with Ora Belle, she said.
“I still want to go this year.”
“That’s what we’re working on,” David said.
Asked what the senior Ways think contributed to their marital longevity, Ora Belle responded, jokingly: “He’s the head of the family. I’m the neck that turns the head.”
More seriously, though, Gene said it comes down to putting the other’s interest ahead of one’s own.
“As followers of Christ, we’ve tried to base our marriage on his teaching,” he said.
Ora Belle added: “I think it’s very important and helps in a marriage to be good friends and to like each other.”
“That helps,” Gene agreed.
He said that, before they were married, a family friend gave them some sage advice.
“This guy lived to be 112,” he noted.
“He took a piece of cotton clothesline and tied knots on both ends. Then he had both of us grab the knot on one end and he grabbed the other. He told us to pull on it. We dragged him through every room of the house, until he was exhausted.
“Then he said, ‘I never want to catch you on opposite ends of this rope or I’ll kick your butts. You pull together.’
“That was a little thing with a lot of meaning.”
The Ways have followed that counsel.
“If they did any fighting, they kept it quiet,” said son David.