It’S A Family Tradition

A sked to explain the secret of his long and happy marriage, the old man leans forward in his armchair.

His twinkling eyes narrow.

“Just keep your mouth shut,” he says. Then he throws his head back and explodes with laughter.

That should tell you what you need to know about Ray Kirkpatrick.

At 92, the Elk resident not only still has both oars in the water, but the boat and the fishing line, to boot.

Sharp? No more so than a freshly stropped straight razor.

Names, dates, events big and small … Kirkpatrick has an amazing and humorous recall of the moments that have shaped his nine decades of living.

One of the biggest events is coming up in a few days.

June, of course, has always been known as the wedding month. Kirkpatrick and his family could be poster kids for that tradition.

On June 19, Ray and his wife, Juanita, celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary.

On the same day, the Kirkpatricks’ daughter, Jeanetta and her husband, Virgil Taylor, will mark their 50th anniversary.

Jeanetta says she decided to get married on June 19, 1950, as a tribute to her parents.

“It meant we had to get married on a Monday evening, which was kind of unusual,” Jeanetta says, adding that “it was worth it.”

The Kirkpatricks and the Taylors plan to celebrate their anniversaries June 17 with a 1-4 p.m. open house at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chattaroy.

Last Sunday, however, they invited me out to the Kirkpatrick homestead. The Kirkpatricks live in a modest double-wide that sits on a hill about a mile over the Pend Oreille County line near Elk.

This couple have been a fixture here so long that the roads are named after them. No kidding. You can find their home on Juanita Lane, which intersects with Kirkpatrick Road.

Ray and Juanita moved here from Spokane, where he had his own dairy, during the Depression.

“I was down there losing my shirt. So I came to Elk and finished losing it,” he says, tossing back his head to laugh again.

It’s impossible not to get captivated by this man. Every tale he tells has a hilarious, self-deprecating twist.

Take, for example, his first job. After getting married at his parents’ home south of Spokane, the Kirkpatricks rented their own place and he got a job in the city.

He began delivering milk via a horse-pulled wagon for Broadview Dairy. That’s right, horse power. Broadview, he says, was the last Spokane dairy to go from hay to gasoline.

In 1931, the company bought trucks and Kirkpatrick found himself behind a wheel instead of holding reins.

It wasn’t an easy transition for a farm boy. More than a few times, Kirkpatrick says, he would come out of a business after a delivery and start whistling for his horses, who always came when he called.

The truck, unfortunately, just sat there.

“Every time I’d do this I’d kinda look around hoping nobody saw me,” he says, looking sheepish.

The Kirkpatricks raised three daughters. Although Ray enjoys good health, Juanita, who just turned 90, has not been as fortunate.

Jeanneta’s husband, Virgil, says having a 50th anniversary doesn’t make him feel so old - as long as the Kirkpatricks are around.

Virgil, 73, is a retired Kaiser worker. Jeanetta, 67, retired from the Riverside School District, where she worked as business manager.

The Newport couple raised five children. They have 22 grandchildren. The Kirkpatricks have 10 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

So congratulations for a combined 120 years of wedded bliss. Whatever the secret is, it obviously worked.

“There’s a lot of love in our family,” says the Taylors’ daughter, Juanita Murray, who was named after her grandmother. “Maybe we don’t always say it out loud, but it’s always known and it’s always felt.”