Through Good Times And Hard Times, Couple Never Forgot Their Love
The Krugers
Sitting on the crushed-velvet sofa in her brick-trimmed Spokane Valley rancher, Elfrieda Kruger ponders her marriage vows.
“I didn’t know when they said ‘for better or worse’ it was going to be this hard,” says Freddie, an articulate 68-year-old with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. “It was just a bunch of words then.”
She met her husband, Cecil, at a 1942 football game at North Central High School. She was 14, he was 18.
“I thought he was the handsomest thing I’d ever seen,” says Freddie. Listening, Cecil flashes his wide smile. At 72, he has a silvery white mustache and gold-framed glasses.
“He wasn’t handsome,” Freddie contradicts herself. “He was pretty.”
They married March 10, 1946, at the Fort George Wright Chapel, Freddie in rationed nylon stockings and a white taffeta lace dress her mother stitched on a borrowed sewing machine.
“It was,” says Cecil, “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
They left immediately for Hawaii, where Cecil worked as a crew chief for military planes flying fresh milk, meat and vegetables throughout the South Pacific.
There they learned to live frugally on $90 a month with no fighting and no expensive long-distance phone calls back to her mother. They felt rich when Cecil’s pay jumped to $120.
Cecil’s 21-year Air Force career took their growing family to Japan, then Germany, ending at Fairchild Air Force Base. He retired as a master sergeant in 1963.
“We kind of lost our identity,” Freddie says. “Here we were in this horrible sea of civilians I didn’t really know.”
But they grew roots in the Valley, attending Gethsemane Lutheran, raising a son and a daughter. At 50, Cecil graduated from Holy Names College. He became a counselor for the state of Washington.
Then came the “for worse” years.
On Dec. 18, 1978, Cecil suffered a stroke. Doctors predicted he’d never speak again.
“It was like somebody chopped his legs out beneath him and his world tumbled down,” Freddie says.
Slowly Cecil’s brain started to heal. By Christmas, a miracle. He began to speak.
“Freddie was the light,” says Cecil, who still gropes for the right words sometimes. “She coped with me. She wouldn’t throw me away.”
Today, life is good. Cecil gives inspirational talks to stroke victims. He learned to carve intricate wooden mallard ducks and black-bellied plovers.
Freddie still vacuums the green shag carpeting, sews beaded tennis shoes, handles the couples’ letter-writing and phone calls. She describes her children with pride.
The couple took a 50th wedding anniversary trip back to Hawaii last year looking for “footprints in the sand.”
It was a sweet review.
“When you look forward to 50 years, that’s a very long distance, that tunnel is far away,” Freddie says. “But when you look back over those years, that path looks very recent because you can see clear to the beginning.”
Says Cecil, “All we did was just stick together.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color)