Love Stories: Couple settle down after life spent on the move

The first time John Wilkens saw his future bride, Edith had the mumps. He caught a glimpse of her on the staircase when he came to came to see his sister who was friends with Edith’s sister.

The mumps didn’t put him off, and Edith liked what she saw, too.

“My sister said, ‘If I was younger, I’d go for that Johnny guy,’ ” Edith recalled, laughing.

However, they didn’t start dating until they both were attending Washington Adventist University in Maryland.

“He picked me up off the street,” Edith said.

She and a friend were walking when John and his friend pulled up alongside them. “Hey, you want to get ice cream?” asked John. And the girls agreed.

He asked her to meet him at Vespers on Friday night. Though he worked late, he still beat her to the service. “I was chatting with a fellow and I saw Edith. She looked at me and walked right on by.”

They differ on what happened next. “I found out he was her most recent boyfriend, and he didn’t know they were broken up,” John said.

In Edith’s version the fellow “most certainly knew we were broken up!”

Still, she was mortified at seeing her current and former beaus together and John had to hustle to catch up with her.

They both quit college soon after they started dating; John to help at the family farm in Delaware and Edith to work in Washington, D.C.

“We saw each other every other weekend,” she said.

Dating involved long commutes by car, bus and ferry. On one of those dates, John proposed in his 1949 Packard and Edith accepted. They married April 27, 1952, and settled into a house on the family farm.

A son, Barry, arrived in 1953, followed by Keith in 1955. By the time his second son was born, John was very ill.

“I’d contracted silo-filler’s disease,” he said. Caused by inhaling dust and gas from fresh silage, the disease made it impossible for him to continue farming.

“I was so sick when Keith was born, I couldn’t even take Edith to the hospital,” he said.

The family moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, where John took a job with a publishing company owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist church. In addition to his job in the bindery, he returned to college to study accounting.

Son Carl completed the family in 1957, and John graduated in 1960.

They moved to New Jersey when John accepted a job as treasurer for the church, a move that would be the first of many spanning from Pennsylvania to Africa.

In almost every new place, John built or remodeled a home, selling it when it was time to move again.

Edith said, “In 63 years of marriage we’ve had 22 homes.”

When her youngest son started school, Edith worked for the Seventh-day Adventist church, too, usually in the bookstores or offices of whatever church her husband was assigned to at the time.

In 1975, he was asked to move to Spokane to be the treasurer of the Upper Columbia Conference. Edith had never heard of Spokane. “I said, ‘Is that in South America?’ ”

John assured her it wasn’t. Smiling at his wife in their Tower Mountain home, John said, “She never really dragged her feet as we moved all over.”

They weren’t in Spokane long that first time. Soon John was asked to go to East Africa.

“There were a lot of reasons to stay here. We were in our late 40s and already had grandchildren. Leaving them was the hardest part,” Edith said. “But I thought it was exciting for John to receive the appointment. We’d often talked about going to the mission field.”

It was a tumultuous time in East Africa. They settled in Rhodesia, which would soon become Zimbabwe, as the country transitioned into independence.

John had his hands full. “I had to keep track of the money in five different currencies.”

Several more moves would see John take a position as director of the publishing house where he once worked in the bindery, and also working as the assistant treasurer for the General Conference world headquarters in Washington, D.C. There they lived in a stone house built during the Whiskey Rebellion.

“That was my dream house – it had history,” Edith said. “George Washington had visited my house!”

Finally, in 1992 they returned to Spokane, where their son Keith had settled with his family.

Two years later, John supposedly retired.

He grinned. “I started volunteering for the church.”

That volunteering took him all over the world from building churches in Africa to managing humanitarian food distribution in Russia. This time, however, Edith stayed put and enjoyed her grandkids.

“She did come to visit me in Russia because I was there six months,” he said. “She was a brave girl.”

Edith, 82, nodded. “It was a scary place.”

At 83, John has finally given up world travels. “It’s not so hard to stay in one place,” he said. “It’s harder not to be a part of something bigger.”

Sixty-three years of marriage has given them a unique perspective. “Through thick and thin means sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you’re not,” Edith said. “Over the years you each change.”

John agreed. “Maturity is an ongoing process.”

Edith smiled. “He teases me a lot, which I didn’t appreciate. Now, he teases other people – not me! I really feel blessed to have Johnny in my life. I depend on him.”