Marriage and the Midas Touch
Marriage and the Midas Touch
Recently, the brothers and their brides gathered with friends and family on the shaded grounds of a homey old ranchhouse at Crooked River Ranch in central Oregon’s high country to cut cake and honor the golden wedding anniversary of Keith, the youngest, and his wife, Barbara—the last of the four families to celebrate a 50th anniversary, boosting the family total to a remarkable 214 years of marriage.
The brothers and their mates—Gordon and Shirley, both 80; Bruce, 78, and Jean, 77; Ross, 75, and Charlene, 74; and Keith, 73, and Barbara, 70—collectively have 11 children.
With lifelong marriages more and more a rarity, the Petrie legacies stand out all the more prominently. The brothers say their late mother had a strong influence. She was a prim Londoner, described by Keith as “English to the core.” Ross recalls, “Victorian she was; she bound the family tightly together.” Their father came from the stormy, remote Shetland Islands to the north of Scotland, and both met while serving in World War I. Following the war, the couple moved to Canada and eventually the United States, where the elder Petrie found work in the pulp mills and paper business in Portland, Ore.
As youths, the brothers were inseparable, active in the YMCA and its Mount St. Helens summer camps; first as campers, then as counselors and lifeguards. The four climbed the infamous mountain together when Keith was 10—42 years before its cataclysmic eruption. (Keith accidentally drove an ice ax into his leg on that climb, and Gordon rushed him down the valley to a doctor. Their mother never knew.)
All four graduated from Portland’s Benson Polytechnic High School and Oregon State College (now University), where Keith and Ross met their future wives.
The other two brothers had an even earlier start on their courtships. Gordon and Shirley met in the fifth-grade. Bruce and Jean started dating at 16, when they worked together at the Portland YMCA for 25 cents an hour. Both couples, women included, were in the army during World War II when they married.
At his younger brother’s celebration, Bruce reminisces under a shade tree, “Jean and I have always worked together. We never had a lot of money, but we only had one checking account. There was no such thing as ‘This is my money. This is your money.’”
Ross and Bruce and their wives still live in Portland. Gordon and Shirley retired to Sisters, Ore. (pop. 959), where he is a city councilman. Just 25 miles away, Keith and Barbara live in the 11,000-acre Crooked River Ranch high-desert community (pop. 2,000). Barbara does volunteer publicity for the senior center.
Gordon impishly credits hearing for his extended marriage. “Shirley has tremendous hearing,” he chuckles. “I never dared to sneak in late at night.” Shirley counters, “God evens everything. Now that Gordon needs hearing aids, he’s glad I have such good hearing.”
Barbara is perhaps the most philosophical about long-life marriages. “Love. This is the basic reason behind a marriage,” she says. “Through the years we found love has many facets that develop or become known slowly. Respect would be one—when you discover that your loved one has so many more qualities and abilities than you first realized.”
Charlene, Ross’ wife, sees the long marriages as a product of their times. “We were born when people stayed married; we didn’t take marriage lightly.”
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