He was dazzled by her smile.
It was wartime, 1943, but for high school seniors Max Don and Marion McCorkle, life revolved around school, friends and tennis.
They met at a tennis match in Boulder, Colo., Max’s hometown. Marion was on the visiting team from Golden, Colo., near Denver.
“I stood there watching, and Marion made this really good play,” 85-year-old Max said Wednesday.
Chatting in the living room of their Mukilteo home, the couple who celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary Feb. 5 remembered that day at the tennis court as though no time had passed.
When Marion smiled at a friend, Max said he was standing in her line of sight. “I got a good smile,” he said. “She was blond, beautiful and I was intrigued.”
On early dates, they went to an amusement park, and once sat watching tracer bullets fired from a Denver arsenal. Both finished high school in 1943, and soon were engaged. World War II sent them in different directions.
Max joined the Navy. He was stationed at Farragut Naval Training Station on Lake Pend Oreille in northern Idaho, and learned to be a Navy radioman. Marion joined the Cadet Nurse Corps, a U.S. Public Health Service program to train nurses during the war. With family in the Puget Sound area, she came to Seattle’s Virginia Mason Hospital. For a time, student nurses were housed in the nearby Sorrento Hotel.
Telling the story of their wedding day, they finished each others’ sentences as they vividly recalled details.
“We agreed to meet on Saturday, Feb. 5. She rode a bus all night,” Max said. The plan was to meet at the bus station in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, not far from Farragut.
At the Navy station, the groom-to-be shined his shoes and got his dress blues ready. Trouble came during a muster for inspection. “Somebody in the back row threw a ball,” Max said. An officer canceled leaves, and wouldn’t budge even when told of the wedding plans.
As Don tells it, he was so determined to meet his fiance that he sneaked out under a fence, ignoring Navy buddies’ warnings not to. He hitchhiked to Coeur d’Alene, where they found a pastor to marry them. He was 19, his bride was 18.
The newlyweds took a bus to Spokane for a one-night honeymoon. They dined at a coffee shop and saw a movie starring Deanna Durbin — neither can recall the film title. By that Sunday afternoon, they were on buses going in opposite directions, hers back to Seattle and his toward the Navy facility in Idaho.
“I went right back in the way I came out,” climbing under a fence, Max said. His Navy duty took him to Guam in the Pacific. Their life together didn’t really begin until after the war.
In all the years since, they raised four daughters who excelled in swimming. Max graduated in business administration from the University of California at Los Angeles. He worked for North American Rockwell during the Apollo lunar project, and later for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. They have nine grandchildren and have lived 31 years in Mukilteo.
“Our young love carried us through,” said Marion, now 84.
“It’s not always a love story. When I’m mad, I’m mad,” her husband said. “This woman is just super,” he added.
Conversation often turns to banter. “It’s sort of a ‘Pickles’ routine,” he said, likening their relationship to the old couple in Brian Crane’s comic strip. “People who don’t know us don’t understand it.”
“You’re going to have ups and downs,” Marion Don said. “Now what I see with young people is divorce, divorce, divorce.”
The secret to their long marriage would fit in a nutshell. It’s one word: respect.
Marion still has that dazzling smile, but her husband said it’s respect that endures, no matter what.
“Respect is the glue that keeps you together,” Max said. “First it’s love, and then respect.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
