This was written years ago and edited early in 2022. On December 10 of 2022 after a seven month struggle with an unusually rare illness, Joyce passed away. This coming Valentines Day would have been our 50th wedding anniversary in our 50 year journey together.
Perhaps, The World’s Greatest Valentine Story
Proverbs says the right words spoken at the right time is as beautiful as silver apples set in a golden frame. So I’m going to share the best silver I have: fifth years ago this Valentine’s Day I married my best friend who had also been my penpal. We knew early on we would probably never own a new car or build a new house as everything we had was funneled toward building a family.
Work is hard when all you really have is a high school diploma, an honorable discharge and a couple of kids before you can find that job that keeps you longer than six months.
But Joyce and I built a family and cobbled together a house out of a camp we bought from Maulita Pierson on the edge of the Elk River in Elkhurst in Clay County, West Virginia. Our family has been taunted, tested, even broken a time or two in the forty-eight years since we first became wedding valentines. But as I write from the home we own, bills all paid, six children, their spouses, twenty-three grandchildren and five great grandchildren sleeping in their happy homes some within minutes of us, with my arm over my best friend and helpmeet I am as blessed as a man gets in this world and in the next.
It Started with a Comic Book
In defense of romance, love and marriage in 1969 while still a teenager I wrote a scathing letter to Marvel Comics for one of their writers’ attacks on love. It was published in the letters pages of Captain America #126.
I got more than 300 letters (because they published my address) mostly from girls my age who thought I was a modern knight. I got a letter from Jon Cheek from Loveland, Ohio who, also a teen and a comic reader wanted to write as a pen pal. He was corresponding with as many as 600 at the time (kind of like Facebook but by snail mail). After a year or so in one of his letters he mentioned a pen pal of his, a girl who lived only a state away from me who wanted to write to me.
I told him it was alright to send her my Dunkirk, Ohio address. About the time I said that I got my first letter from her (so he either anticipated my answer or was playing matchmaker.) She and I became penpals and wrote to each other for the next couple of years, as I went from high school to trade school to Marine Corp basic training.
She was my lifeline while I was stationed overseas. On my first arrival back in the states I arranged to meet her.
Four incredible months later, I married my penpal and best friend in the world on Valentine’s Day 1974.
Pen Pal Deja Vu
Before we leave the penpal thing let me tell you about an incredible coincidence that was related to me as I became engaged to mine.
My father was a corporal in the U.S Army in Korea during the Korean Conflict. Actually he was Sargent a number of times, but his life style and attitude kept him perpetually as an NCO. He was soldier, military police, guard, mess cook and more during his eight years in the service. He had enlisted at 16 and grew up in the Army. While he was overseas he met and married a beautiful oriental woman, married her and had a young child. During a war assignment onboard a ship, a sunami hit the island where his wife’s village rested, as well as his own base of operations. Everything was wiped out. He never kept photos of this, but years later I found a 35mm roll of negatives that showed the tragedy. The land was flattened in mud clear out to the ocean horizon. Of the base, only a single Quonset hut was left, but rather than the half-cylinder corrugated building you’d expect, it was reduced to a shell, wrapped around a single remaining power pole like a leaning metal teepee. He never spoke of this. I would not know of the tragedy if my mother hadn’t told me.
She had a secret tragedy of her own. A teenager of the late forties, early fifties, she was drawn to the Hollywood bad guy types. She met a dropout gang leader of a motorcycle gang. While this might sound like scripted right out of Hollywood, this daughter of the respected town sherif deputy fell for the delinquent and found herself pregnant. Here’s where Hollywood veers off. She married him but not long after in a fit of rage, her husband, not Dad, beat her. And did so, so badly, she was left for dead, her unborn child – stillborn. He went to prison for life. She divorced him and fell into depression.
That’s when the magic happened. Her best friend was engaged to a man in the Army overseas. She told him about Wanda. She said Wanda could use some cheering up. Her fiancé likewise said there was a man here who lost a wife and child and it would be therapy for him if he could spend his time trying to cheer up another rather than concentrate on his own tragedy. Best part, they were both local. They were both born and raised in Hardin County, Ohio, mere miles from each other. He encouraged him to write Wanda from his new post on Okinawa, Japan. Wanda’s friend, like a devious matchmaker, told her about Leo’s tragedy and insisted she concentrate less on her own sorrows and try to bring some encouragement to him by writing him. For more than two years they were penpals, at times writing twice a week. They became best of friends before he came home to meet her.
Within the year they were married. A year after that, I came along. I would be the first of six children. His family, a good Catholic family, said he would be ex-communicated because he married a divorced woman.
His family insisted it wouldn’t last. So he became a Methodist, like she was. They made their marriage last their lifetime.
So when I came back from Okinawa and within the year, married my pen pal and best friend, my mom told me, the story I just related. She showed me a pile of letters they kept. It rivals our own.
Beautiful but No Bed of Roses
As most would expect, life is not easy. Everyone faces heartaches, disappointments and tragedies. For those raised in loving families and believe in an Almighty God, have learned that couples can make it past these things. Or, if they stumble can recover. That was our story. It might have different elements from other stories, but it resolved with familiarity: “with God’s help, they now live happily ever after.”
One More Unfinished Bit of Business
Remember Jon Cheek, Junior, the matchmaker who put us together? Well nearly eight years ago when I first wrote this story in this blog, I enlisted the readers help in finding Jon. Yes, I wanted to find Jon Cheek, Junior. Small world after all. A local tv station picked up the story and one of the station’s employees was also from Loveland, Ohio (outside Cincinnati) and was Facebook friends with Jon who had moved to Texas. Now, we are once again reunited. Thank you, Jon. This new decade and new year 2022 on Valentine’s Day we will be celebrating our 48th wedding anniversary and this never would have happened without Jon. This “Cupid” from Loveland united two of his pen pals (more than 400 miles apart) in 1971. I was born and raised in northwestern Ohio dairy country in Hardin County Ohio in a little community named Dunkirk. I was the oldest of six. All have left Hardin County. My parents are dead. But people I graduated with in Dunkirk would tell you in a heartbeat where I went. Joyce was a coal miner’s daughter in Maysel in Clay County, West Virginia. In no possible reality do we ever meet without Jon. Ours is an incredible romantic story that starts as penpals of Jon’s who are introduced to one another by mail (yes, generations before email or Facebook). We have lived all our years since 1974 in Clay County, moving into the community of Elkhurst in 1978. And to think this all started because I wrote a letter to Marvel Comics (published in Captain America #126 in 1969) defending traditional marriage. Back then Jon had no idea the legacy that he set in motion. We are grateful that something wonderful happened as a result of his accidental matchmaking.
Gary Lee Stuber
gary_stuber@yahoo.com