Maxine and Robert Parker married 65 years…they’re still having fun

Robert and Maxine will celebrate 65 years of marriage on June 13. They have three children, Barbara and Wayne Uthe; Diane and Eric Sorensen; and John and Ronda Parker. The children have each had three children; so the Parkers have nine grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Robert and Maxine Parker will be married for 65 years on June 13. They were married on that date in 1954 at the Winston Methodist Church.

If you ask them the secret of a long and happy marriage, they’ll tell you there really is no secret. They just took it as a matter of course.

“We didn’t know there was any other way,” says Maxine. “We grew up in families that married and stayed together.”

Maxine was born and raised in the country between Altamont and Pattonsburg. She went to Altamont School until it closed. After that, students had a choice between going to Winston or Gallatin. Maxine had a friend in Winston, so that’s the school she chose. She graduated in 1954.

Robert was born in St. Joseph. His father lived in the city, but was always a farmer at heart. In 1946, he moved the family to a farm south of Winston. Robert started at Winston school in the seventh grade and graduated in 1952.

“I was a junior and she was a freshman,“ Robert says. “I kind of latched hold of her.”

When Robert and Maxine were dating back in the fifties, there was no such thing as cell phones. Most people didn’t even have landline phones in their homes yet.

“On Wednesday and Saturday, if I got done with chores early, I’d see if I could get the car from my folks,” says Robert. “I’d go in and get cleaned up and drive out to her place. She wouldn’t know whether I was coming till I got there. She’d get cleaned up and we’d go to a movie. There were theaters at Gallatin and Pattonsburg. Now you can just pick up a cell phone and make those kind of arrangements. But it wasn’t like that back then.”

Even very important information required a relay of human connection.

“When our first child was born we had to call an uncle in Altamont and give him the information,” says Maxine. “He went and told my folks. Then they went down the road and told his folks.”

Robert went to college at the University of Missouri where he received a BS degree in agriculture. The couple would be separated for the next two years, but they stayed in constant touch.

“We’d write one another,” Maxine says. “Letters were all we had for communication.”

Whether it was the wise thing to do or not, they got married in 1954. Robert was only halfway through college.

“I had to marry her so she could go to work and put me through school,” says Robert.

“We had no money. I took $50 and my dad’s car and we went on a honeymoon to South Missouri. We got a motel for $4 a night, cockroaches included.”

“My wedding dress cost $25 and I still have it,” says Maxine. She adds, “He told me that if I put him through college I wouldn’t have to work anymore. I believed him. He should have been a salesman. He lied.”

Maxine got a job with MFA Insurance in Columbia, about half a block from their apartment.

Robert graduated from college in June of 1956 and then went into the Army. (He’d been in the Army ROTC for four years and had made second lieutenant.) He took his basics at Fort Still, OK, in the regular Army. He was there for three years, right between the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Their first child, Barbara, was born in Oklahoma in 1956, and their second daughter Diane was born in 1958.

“The Army made a teacher out of me,” Robert says. “And this was a fellow who’d never taken a speech course in his life. I was suddenly getting up and talking in front of a classroom of people.” He got over the shock and taught three years.

His third year, the Army sent him and another lieutenant to Germany where he taught how to prepare a nuclear round for firing out of an “Honest John” missile. Robert says it was like a bottle rocket on a big truck.

During this time, Maxine was eight months pregnant with Diane. Living on the Army base far from home, there were no grandmothers around to help take care of the children.

“We wrote letters to one another every day and never saw any of them,” says Robert. “So I had no idea what was going on with her pregnancy.”

But the Army took care of Maxine while he was away.

“They called on me, checked on me, and once a month the unit would have a party,” Maxine says. “I didn’t drink but that didn’t bother them at all. They’d come and take me out to eat and have a good time. The Army really does take care of its own.”

In 1959, Robert got out of the Army and moved his family back to the farm at Winston.

“I thought I’d go into farming and make a fortune,” he says. “I guess I’d never learned much while I was in school.”

He’d purchased a farm just north of Altamont. He rented it that first year, and then started farming himself.

“That farm had no livable house, so we rented a house off the Winston Cattle Company on a farm next to the one we’d bought,” Robert says. “The Winston Cattle Company bought up a lot of small farms and ran cattle; it was supposed to have been owned by a bunch of movie stars.”

The square house had four rooms, electricity, but no running water, no telephone, and no gravel roads. They rented it for $10 a month.

At the suggestion of a banker, they bought Western Ewes. It was not a good investment for them. The sheep market went down and they sold fat lambs for $10 a head. “Sheep look for a place to lie down and die,” says Robert. “We were gradually going broke.”

This period was probably the worst time for their marriage, at least financially. Maxine got a job at the sale barn café one day a week. Her paycheck was what they ate on for a week. Robert took odd jobs and worked around.

Their son John was born in 1960.

“We’d buy a bottle of Pepsi and split it three ways for the kids to have a treat,” says Maxine.

Then Robert applied for a job at Daviess County Farm Agency Office — called ASCS back then. He got hired in 1961 and worked there for 27 years, until 1988.

He farmed weekends and evenings. After he got the ASCS job, he purchased another farm about a mile north of the first one. It had a house on it.

“We bought the farm for less than we could build a new house,” he says.

“The job changed everything,” says Maxine. She explains that the job paid wages suitable for somebody with a degree in agriculture, as opposed to picking up jobs as a day laborer.

“There were not many jobs in Daviess County that paid very well,” she says.

While Robert worked at the ASCS office, they hired a young man to help them on the farm, Mark Corwin. Mark worked every summer through his high school years.

“I’d feed him on Saturday,” says Maxine. “And bake him a pie.”

“It was the only time I got pie,” says Robert.

Robert served as district director out of the state office for six years. He retired in 1994 with 37 years total service, counting the three years in the Army.

All three of their children graduated from Winston, and Robert served 10 years on the school board; he was secretary, then president. He and Maxine continued to be active in the Winston Methodist Church, where Robert was treasurer for 25 years.

They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2004.

The Parkers have taken a trip every year. They’ve been to every state, most of the Provinces of Canada; Mexico; Australia; and New Zealand. Robert got to see Germany and Italy while he was in the Army.

They plan their trips, but not on so tight a schedule they can’t get off the beaten track. It was those ‘off-road’ excursions that turned out to be the most interesting. One particularly memorable side trip took them to a dried up mining town near Oatman, AZ, on Route 66. One of the main attractions was feeding the donkeys. Apparently after the mining town went bust, the donkeys were turned loose and just ran around the streets.

Another ghost town was past Boise, ID, called Silver City. They got there by dirt road up a mountain pass.

“It wasn’t that bad if you’re a country person, so we took down it for 60 miles at 30 miles an hour,” says Robert. “It was called Silver City, population six.”

The whole town had been moved from somewhere in the 1800s by some unknown feat of engineering. The jewel of the ghost town was a hotel with a stage office, built just like the days of stage coaches selling tickets. They were greeted by a grizzled old man with whiskers who could have stepped out of any Western novel. They got a tour of the hotel for $5. All of the rooms were filled with real-time antiques. They were amazed to see a knotted rope coiled on the floor of a room with the end dangling out a window. That was the fire escape. They could have booked a room for overnight at the hotel, but they said “no thanks.”

Another memorable trip was through Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. Here they came across their very first experience with a nursery.

“They had babysitters in a room with the doors locked and matching bracelets to verify identification,” says Maxine. “The girls were age one and three and we were used to carrying them around. When I realized we could safely leave them somewhere while we went through the cave, I thought, thank goodness!”

According to Maxine and Robert, there are several secrets to a long and happy marriage:

1. Marry young and live long enough to have a long marriage.
2. Marry somebody with the same interests as you, who looks at the world a whole lot the same way.
3. Be willing to make adjustments as you go.
4. Keep your sense of humor.
5. Keep the romance alive. (Maxine and Robert still walk down the street holding hands.

“We are leading and assisting one another now,” says Robert.)

5. Have fun together.