Clyde and Mildred Hulet of rural McFall have been married for 70 years and will celebrate their 71st anniversary this May 13. He is 89 and she is 88.
This website brought to you in part by the following sponsor:
Mildred fell and broke her hip and then fell again and broke her leg on the same side. Since getting a lifetime teaching certificate at Maryville, this year is the only year Clyde hasn’t taught school. This year his job is to take care of Mildred. It’s on-the-job training and so far she has taught him how to cook.
Clyde doesn’t consider it a burden to take care of his wife. After all, she has nursed him when he needed her. Through the years he has had surgeries for his hip and back and a bout with cancer.
Clyde and Mildred Hulet at their 70th wedding anniversary celebration.
“For better, for worse, in sickness and health, till death do us part,” said Mildred. “It’s the vows we took.”
Clyde pulls up a chair and obviously enjoys telling his stories.
“It’s why I’ve lived this long,” he said. “So I could tell everybody what I did.”
Clyde was born and raised two miles northwest of Albany and went to country schools. The family moved about every year during the Depression. He attended Carmack in the first grade….
“The first day of school, I remember it rained. My cousin, a little blue eyed girl, and I were riding in the rumble seat of Model A. She got wet and cried. Of course little boys didn’t care if they got wet. I remember things from back then like they happened yesterday, but I can’t remember yesterday.”
When the Wabash Train wrecked at Darlington, his father put him on a horse and they rode to town…. “I remember my father putting a six-foot ring of baloney on the horse. That’s how it was shipped on the refrigerator car that was in the wreck. We had baloney at every meal. That was a highlight because we never had meat like that.”
Clyde remembers the winter of 1937 when it snowed level with the fences and then rained on top of that and the kids skated to school…. “We chopped a path for the cows to get from the barn to the pond. My father made a sled out of timbers and picked up corn fodder and fed the corn to the pigs and the fodder to the cows.”
As a young boy, Clyde’s father taught him two crafts, carpentry and sheep shearing. He has sheared thousands of sheep, most in the Northwest Missouri area.
Clyde graduated from Albany.
Mildred was born and raised in and graduated from school at Stanberry. Her father worked as a fireman on the railroad. She remembers getting passes to ride the train and they went all the way to Oregon several times….
“It was a long trip. We’d visit father in the engine room and come back dirty and smelling like smoke.”
Her mother plucked or “picked” chickens at VOGT poultry house. Mildred remembers walking everywhere during the Depression because the family had no car.
She and Clyde got married right after school in 1944. Mildred was 17. They were married at the Kennsington Baptist Church in Kansas City.
“After I graduated we drove to Kansas City. I stayed with my aunt that night and we got married the next day.”
In 1944, Clyde was drafted into the service…. “The worst part of it was that we had no training, two months and nine days. But they needed us as replacements for the boys lost during the Battle of the Bulge. The Army had been pushed back to Luxembourg.”
He said it seemed like most of the boys he graduated with went overseas the same time he did. He was with the 50th Armored Infantry Battalion, Third Army, under General Patton, who he got to meet.
The soldiers went from Maryland to England on a ship. They crossed the English Channel by boat, but had to stay on the channel for five days while the water was cleared of mines…. “All we had to eat was cheese and all we had to drink was tea.”
They landed at Le Havre, France, in January. It was cold and snowing. They were put on a railroad car and shipped in a cattle car with open slats. There were 48 soldiers and their equipment in one car.
They headed toward Luxenburg. They got there traveling in the open beds of trucks.
They arrived at the front line, called the Siegfried Line, and took to their fox holes where they waited. Huge armies waged the war to breach the West Wall. They eventually saw victory, but the fighting was grueling and the elements were harsh. They were young men of great courage and valor. It was a spirit that helped them survive the war and its aftermath.
“We almost froze, it was so cold,” Clyde recalls. “Marvin Coffey, a classmate of mine from Albany got his leg blown off. When Marvin got back to the states, he got an artificial leg, went to college at Maryville, got a master’s degree and a specialist degree, and was a superintendent at Stanberry for a while. Then I lost track of him.”
With God’s grace, Clyde hardly had any scratches from the fighting. But he landed in a hospital in Ireland with double pneumonia. They sent him back after he recovered, only this time he flew across the channel to Marseille, France. He started work in the motor pool. He became a driver for a lieutenant colonel in the army whose job was to inspect the living quarters of the staging area.
“I drove him all over France,” Clyde said. “I thought I was one of the luckiest soldiers on earth.”
Clyde drove to Cannes and Nice and stayed at the hotels for the promenades and saw all the entertainment. He swam in the Mediterranean Sea on Christmas Day.
“The lieutenant colonel treated me like one of his sons,” Clyde said. “When my appendix ruptured, the colonel drove me to the hospital, stayed through the operation, and came and got me two weeks later. We went back to traveling.”
Clyde left the war to return home by way of Paris. The plane lost an engine so they landed in Iceland. Then they flew to Greenland. Finally to Springfield, Md., and back to the United States in June of 1946. “I took a train from Boston and zipped to Stanberry,” he said. “I’ve been everywhere.”
While he was gone, Mildred stayed at her folk’s house. Their oldest daughter Marilyn was born while Clyde was off to war. She was a year old before Clyde finally got to see her.
Mildred also had two brothers fight in WWII, Kenneth was in the army, and Dennis was in the Navy. They both made it home all right.
“Mildred has been a wonderful, brave lady all of her life,” Clyde said.
Mildred, or Milly, worked for 23 years at White Auto Supply in Bethany. She was a buyer in the office. She ordered water pumps and generators from all over the United States.
Clyde taught 32 years at Bethany and substituted 10 years at Pattonsburg for grades kindergarten through high school. He spent 15 years teaching classroom drafting and industrial arts and was the carpentry instructor and then spent 18 years as the vo-tech teacher at Bethany. He and his students built 18 homes, one a year.
He and Mildred bought their farm outside of McFall in March of 1947. They moved in on a day when there was 10 inches of sleet on the ground. It was a small three-room house with three-inch cracks between the boards on the floor.
“One night I heard rats, so I got the shotgun,” Clyde said. “I killed some rats and scared the wits out of Mildred and Marilyn.”
Clyde was a skilled carpenter so he fixed the house up and remodeled it to a ranch-style…. “Those early days were the good old days. Wood heat. No electricity. No running water. No gravel on the roads. Those were the good old days, but I don’t want to go back.”
Clyde and Mildred had three beautiful girls. Marilyn was a school teacher and was working towards her PhD when she died of cancer at age 50. Judy was a hostess for the Jefferson Bus Line and died of Multiple Sclerosis at age 64. Meredith is their only living daughter. Her home is just down the road from them and she checks on them daily. They have seven grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
In 1949, when he was 25, Clyde was called to preach in the Methodist Church. He went to college and was ordained by Bishop Ivan Lee Holt in 1951.
He taught one year at Benton in St. Joseph and preached that year at South Park Methodist in St. Joe. He returned to the farm in 1956. He was offered a job at South Harrison in Bethany.
“I made my living teaching and doing carpentry,” he said. “I couldn’t make it on the farm. I took up goat farming as a hobby.”
Over the years, he has served as pastor at Bolckow, Fillmore and Amazonia, Clearmont, Eagleville, Hobb Chapel in Harrison County and Blythedale.
In 1980, they decided to have their own Independent Non Denominational church in 1987 in Pattonsburg. They built it, but then the floods of 1993 came and the church was flooded twice.
He got a job with FEMA when Pattonsburg decided to build their town up the hill. He worked for two years soliciting patrons to move.
“It was terrible,” he said. “It hurt older people to leave their homes. But eventually all but a few did leave.”
The church moved to the new town and started over. The congregation has always been fairly small and the building is family owned because nobody else would finance it. It is the Word of Life Christian Fellowship Church.
It’s a nice little church building with four Sunday School rooms, kitchen, and two bathrooms. Clyde has done weddings in the church, but no funerals since the church sits right next door to a funeral home.
The secret of being married 70 years is no secret, the couple said.
“We love each other,” said Clyde. “We have words, but then we forgive. The Bible tells us to not let the sun go down on our wrath.”
“I tell him I love him and he tells me he loves me,” Mildred said. “I help him, he helps me.”