Two score and 10 years ago mom and dad began a journey in Missouri that took them all across the country and even the world. That day they vowed to stay together for better and for worse. In the years that followed they got plenty of both. Mom told me once that her and dad had read Mad Magazine on their honeymoon night (no I hadn’t asked), but based on my own age I have another theory because soon after that fateful day in Missouri, in a small town in South Texas, I joined the team, and from that moment on there was never a dull moment. My earliest memories are of picnics at Gramma Hoffman’s house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, endless food and fun with my brother, my cousins, aunts and uncles. From the beginning it was all about family.
In Hawaii we surfed on Styrofoam surfboards, skateboarded and swam in the Pacific Ocean while my mother battled giant tropical spiders and kept the family together while dad traveled the orient each time returning with jewels for mom and treasures for us kids. We watched Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in the evenings and if Daren hadn’t told on me and Tracy for starting a fire in our bedroom it would have been a perfect three years for us!
In Salem, Oregon Tracy and I rode banana seat sting ray bicycles from morning until night, shot slingshots & b-b guns and played basketball, football and baseball. Dad went to Vietnam and mom had the joy of raising three rambunctious boys all on her own. We listened to tapes of dad from Vietnam, sometimes interrupted by the sounds of war. But he came home - I still remember the day that he came squealing around the last corner to our house in his brand new Pontiac Lemans returning from that trip.
Tracy and I cried in the back seat of our car as we drove away from Oregon and headed to South Dakota. But once there again we made the most of it as a family. I remember many grown-up parties at the house where us kids would hang out in the basement and listen to the adults talking loud upstairs and sneaking up there to get chips and other snacks. We endured snow drifts all the way up to our second story windows and 70 degree below zero temperatures in the winter and golf ball size hail big enough to kill jack rabbits in the summer. Dad again left mom alone with us not-so-little kids for weeks at a time while he pulled duty on alert waiting for the Russians to start some trouble. With encouragement from dad us kids joined the swim team which served to keep us out of trouble as Tracy and I were discovering girls and there was a suspicious discovery of cigarettes in our bedroom that has never been fully explained to this day. Dad bought us motorcycles which was great fun--many times we cheated death on those Yamahas. Not sure what dad was thinking there. This is also where mom got her first job working for Max Factor cosmetics at the Base Exchange. I think that dad must have liked the extra money because she pretty much kept working after that.
When dad retired from the Air Force in 1977 the family returned to Oregon and I stayed in South Dakota to begin college and life on my own. Dad started a new career in real estate and after a year I showed up in Oregon again, no more snow drifts! Now it was Daren’s turn to challenge the parents. Between skate boarding and the broken knees that went with it, Daren and his parter in crime Jeff Netz showed the parents that maybe the third time was not such a charm. Not yet anyway.
Then after many years of attending but not graduating from college I joined the Army to "Be all that I could be". Mom told me that after they dropped me off at the Portland Army office she saw dad cry for the first time. Maybe the "Old man" did have a heart after all.
Then while I was in Germany I got an emergency phone call from mom and dad that Tracy had cancer again and I should come home to see if I could be a bone marrow donor for him. During the entire ordeal never once did I hear mom or dad complain about the financial or emotional stress & difficulty. I remember mom telling Tracy that she wished she could take his sickness for him and I wondered if I would do that same.
Then another one of marriage’s milestones came when Daren began dating Kyla and soon they were married. I remember Kyla playing footsie with Daren under the table at La Casa Real and Daren expressing his interest in her. Now the parents had their house to themselves.
The years pasted and the parents settled into their routines. They worked and they waited patiently for their first born son to get to his next milestone. Sure I was 40 years old, thin, single and very neat, so what? Mom told me way too often that she didn’t really care if she never had grandchildren, sniff sniff, that was ok...so why was she crying? Then at my 40th birthday party in San Antonio Daren stood up at our restaurant on the River Walk and shocked all those present by announcing that “Joey has a girl friend”. And soon Sara joined the family and before long mom and dad had their first grandson, Luke. Followed quickly by Grant, and surprise, Owen and then Samuel and hey look, Karsten! And for a few glorious years mom and dad had four grandchildren within 15 minutes of their home. Yes it was all finally worth it. Well it was fun while it lasted.
Today with the kids all grown up mom’s only competition for dad’s attention are his running buddy Paul and a vixen named “Cricket”.
So tonight I congratulate you on fifty years of marriage and for your dedication to your marriage and your family. You have made me what I am today and there are really no words that I can say to express how blessed I feel. I wish you many more years of happy marriage together.
