Wedded bliss

Harold and Iola Meierhenry will be celebrating the 75th anniversary of their marriage on next Wednesday at a celebration thrown by their daughters.

“We’re having a big party,” daughter Marilyn Katt said.

Harold and Ole, as the family calls Iola, now live at Nye Courte after spending most of their married life farming near Telabasta.

Harold begins the story of how he met his wife by telling how he almost missed meeting her at all. They were from different backgrounds. He was a farmer from the Telabasta area. She was a young woman from Havelock -- once an independent town, now a suburb of Lincoln. They grew up differently.

As a town girl, Ole remembers the crew that laid the brick streets down Havelock Avenue when she was a child. She retains a clear picture of the gang of men as they bent to set the bricks and how one of them, a black man, sang spirituals as he worked. The trolley line went by her house. Her father had a few banty roosters in the back yard, but that’s as rural as it got. Harold lived with an extended family on the “home place” and lots of family nearby. There were cows to milk as well as chickens to feed and work was constant and hard.

“My dad,” Harold said, “was not very happy when I started to go with a ‘city girl.’ I think he had several country girls picked out for me. But I had an Uncle Hank who worked in Lincoln at Cushman Motors. One time ...”

Ole takes over the story.

“My brother, Harold Shipmen, worked at Cushman and one day he asked me to take a couple of his friends to see the Capitol. I had never seen the Capitol, but I said that I would take them. One of those friends was Harold.

“I saw Harold a few times after that when his mother came to Lincoln to get girls from the Lincoln Children’s Home to help her on the farm,” she said.

“A few months later,” Harold takes over the story again, “my Uncle Hank told me that Ole was waiting for me to come and see her. It weighed on my mind all Sunday so that afternoon I got in my Model A and drove to Havelock. Ole was down the street getting an ice cream cone. When I saw her coming towards me on the sidewalk -- Bingo! -- this farm boy’s in love.”

Ole again picks up the thread of the story. They do this a lot. They both know the story well.

“He came to Havelock a couple of times, and then I went to the farm to meet his family,” she said. “We went to church where I met all the relatives. That’s when we knew.”

They were married in her father’s garden in Havelock. After the wedding they traveled as far as York, stopped at a soda fountain for a drink, and then spent the night in Lexington before traveling to Colorado for a honeymoon.

“Ole insisted on a honeymoon,” Harold said. “I never thought about a honeymoon, but she insisted.”

“I also insisted,” Ole continued, “on our own bedroom and our own bedroom set in his parent’s home. It had been a dining room, but the kitchen was big enough for everyone to eat in.”

Everyone was Harold’s parents, two brothers, uncle Hank Niederdippe (who worked at Cushman in Lincoln) and Grandpa Niederdippe who was confined to a wheel chair.

Ole made the transition from city girl to country woman. She learned how to be a farm wife. Her mother-in-law had an incubator in one of the upstairs bedrooms where she hatched the eggs. There were also two beds in the room.

“I got some eggs of my own,” Ole said, “and then chickens. My mother-in-law was good to me. She gave me a spot in her cupboard where I could keep the dishes I received as a wedding gift.”

Ole had chickens and her father had bought them a calf.

“I washed. I cooked. I separated the milk and cleaned the equipment,” she said. “I did everything but milk a cow. Grandma was glad I didn’t milk cows because she liked to sit under a cow and milk. She could rest sitting under a cow.”

Life on the farm in the 1930s was hard.

“I remember,” Harold said, “seeing a cloud

coming from the southeast. It was grasshoppers.”

“The corn had ears on it and it was chewed down to about a foot and a half. We had fence posts that were chewed. I was in bed with JoAnn when this happened,” Ole said.

JoAnn was their first child. She had eczema and the doctor told her parents that she needed oranges. Their crop was destroyed and oranges were rare treats and expensive. There was no money to buy oranges. Harold went to work for the Works Progress Agency (WPA).

“I drove a team of horses for the WPA. We moved dirt to make road beds for the farm roads so they wouldn’t flood out,” he said. “I just did it that one summer when we didn’t have any crop.”

The WPA wages were enough to buy oranges for JoAnn.

They continued to live with Harold’s parents until shortly before their daughter Marilyn was born. Harold’s father had a heart attack and died. His mother moved into Telabasta and the young family moved back to the farm.

When asked the secret of their marriage, Ole responded: “Hard work and learn to love what you’re doing.”

Harold added, “She must have loved me a lot or she would have gone back to Havelock, and that’d been it.”

“And I’m still putting up with you. You sit in one chair and I sit in the other, just far enough” Ole said as her smile grew wider.

“The Lord wanted me to have her,” Harold said with a twinkle in his eye.

“I fooled you. I stayed with you,” she said, enjoying the banter.

“And I thought it was because you loved me,” Harold said, getting in the last word with a grin. You have the feeling that they have said all this before and that it tickles them to say it again.

The party at Calvary Methodist Church will be a grand one. The Meierhenrys have always been church people so it’s an appropriate setting for their celebration.

“As soon as she thought I was big enough (he was an infant) my mother took me to church. I’ve been going ever since,” Harold mused.

Their girls see that they get to church every Sunday and have not missed once since moving to Nye Courte four years ago. Their three girls, who all stayed close to home, will be there: JoAnn Scheer from Arlington, Marilyn Katt from Fremont and Judy Geisler from Hooper. Harold and Ole have seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren who will help them celebrate.

Harold will begin the stories and Ole will help him finish them. It’s a system that has worked for two people in love for 75 years.