The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Couple at 70 years of marital happiness

Jane and Elvin Browne of Washington Twp. (above) will be celebrating their 70th anniversary in July and also will be attending their 75th Stivers High School Class reunion. They built the dollhouse together (below) based on Belmont neighborhood house a Jane once lived in.

Chris Stewart/Chris Stewart Jane and Elvin Browne of Washington Twp. (above) will be celebrating their 70th anniversary in July and also will be attending their 75th Stivers High School Class reunion. They built the dollhouse together (below) based on Belmont neighborhood house a Jane once lived in.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Bank forecloses on charter school building
4:18 p.m.
Board may move for Kettering AD's dismissal
2:29 p.m.
Fairborn Sweet Corn Festival violated religious free speech, court rules
11:53 a.m.
A third of Bellbrook students absent
10:58 a.m.
New State law gives school districts reach to punish cyberbullying
10:42 a.m.
> More headlines

By Katherine Ullmer, Staff Writer Updated 8:28 AM Wednesday, May 13, 2009

WASHINGTON TWP., Montgomery County — The aroma of a freshly baked cherry pie filled the air in Jane and Elvin Browne’s Washington Twp. home on a recent Wednesday morning.

The pie was later served in a Florida room built by Elvin Browne, 93, on 70-year-old antique etched glass plates the Brownes received on their wedding day, July 28, 1939.

The Brownes will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary July 28 and their 75th class reunion (class of 1934) for Stivers High School on June 6. They met in a high school dramatic art class. He sat in the first row, she in the second. Soon they were sitting side by side. Their first date was on Oct. 14, 1933. They planned to see ‘‘The Bowery’’ with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper and ‘‘The Three Little Pigs ’’ cartoon at Loew’s Theater, but it was crowded, so they went to another theater.

They lived in Dayton’s Belmont area for 20 years. In later years, they built a large two-story doll house patterned after Jane’s home that stands in their Florida room. They hoped to marry soon after high school, but the Depression made jobs scarce.

“We had to wait until he finished his four-year tool making apprenticeship at NCR,” Jane, 92, said. Then, “I had to quit NCR because they wouldn’t hire married women.”

Elvin worked 40 years at NCR. Moving from Belmont, they have lived for 50 years in Washington Twp. Their children, Dale and Kristie, who live in California and Hawaii, respectively, will help celebrate in July.

“People often ask how we have made our marriage last all these years,” Elvin said. “We made a deal at the outset that I would handle all the major decisions and Jane would handle all the minor ones. And to this day, 70 years later, the need for a major decision has never come up,” he said, laughing. Both have enjoyed golfing and searching for Jane’s pin cushion half dolls and other antiques.

On a typical day, they get up at 3:30 a.m. They each eat half a doughnut and drink a cup of coffee. They often watch TV, and if the newspaper arrives early, Elvin reads the sports page while she does the puzzles. “Then we will go back to bed,” Jane said.

Later, they drive to the bank, grocery, etc.

“He drives there because he knows the way, and I drive home,” she said. “I tell him I don’t talk as much when I drive and he says ‘I should drive more often.’ ”

“We cook together,” Jane said, “but mostly we eat out.”

She likes to bake and crochet and is making shawls for her grandchildren, and crocheted wedding cakes.

“We won’t be here to see them married, but they’ll have a cake to remember us by,” she said.

“When my parents were killed 10 years ago in Kettering (in a traffic accident), (the Brownes) became surrogate parents to me,” Nancy Ardrey-Mayer of North Carolina told the Dayton Daily News. Her parents and the Brownes were neighbors, and “they have always been there for me,” she said.

Share this article