Differences Helped Keep Marriage Exciting Through The Years

The Silvers

Chuck and Jean Silver have their differences.

She has a college degree, and he quit high school. She loves to dance, and he learned merely to please her. She has trouble remembering the year she was graduated from college, and he can still draw a map of their childhood neighborhood that includes who lived where, what routes the buses took and where the best vacant lots could be found.

Jean, 70, served 14 years in the Washington state Legislature. Chuck, 71, still laughs when recalling - while practicing his Boy Scout skills - the time he built a bonfire in a church basement.

“I had fun as a kid,” Chuck says. “I had fun in school, too.” That’s how, he adds, “I started out ahead of her” - he motions to Jean - “and ended up behind her.”

Chuck and Jean have been married for 50 years, two months and 23 days. But they’ve known each other far longer. They grew up in what they still refer to as “the East End,” now known as the East Central neighborhood, and Jean remembers Chuck as a boy.

“He threw a snowball at me,” she says.

But they didn’t get together as a couple until after World War II. Chuck had just finished his 3-1/2-year Navy hitch when, while on a date with another girl, he drove to the old Triple XXX Drive-In restaurant.

“So we pulled in and Jean came running out,” Chuck recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, hi Betty, how are you?’ And she said, ‘Hi, Chuck.’ The girl I was with said, ‘Her name isn’t Betty. It’s Jean.’ And I said, ‘Hell, I’ve known Betty Merrill since grade school.’ “

The next night Chuck came back to meet Betty Jean and escort her home. One year later they were married.

For Jean, the attraction was obvious. “Chuck’s a nice guy,” she says. “He really is. And he was funny.”

Not to mention hard-working. After holding a number of jobs, Chuck used his GI Bill to become an apprentice glazier. Ultimately, he would run his own glass-cutting business.

Meanwhile, after bearing and helping to raise three sons, Jean returned to school, earned a degree in accounting, returned to work and, in 1982, began serving the first of seven terms in the Legislature.

Chuck is clear on one thing: Jean didn’t go back to work until their son was in junior high. There were no “latch-key kids” in the Silver household.

That old-school sense of parental responsibility blended well with the way they worked out disagreements.

“Chuck and I are completely different on many issues,” Jean says. “And, yes, we do get mad at each other. But we don’t run out of the house or anything like that.”

“I think you have to go into it with the idea that the marriage is permanent,” Chuck says. “I think too many people today go into it with the idea that, ‘Well, if it don’t work, we’ll get a divorce.’ And if you go into it with that idea, you don’t have a snowball’s chance.”

“It’s great to have someone you can really trust,” Jean says. “We’ve really tried to keep this thing going.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color)