State of the Union

State of the Union

Lovebirds for life, three senior couples share their decades-spanning stories.

IS IT POSSIBLE to remain in love for years and never lose the sizzle that drew you to each other in the first place? Against the odds, and defying the prevalence of divorce, some relationships have super staying power. For some lucky (or hard-working) lovers, growing old does not mean growing apart.

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we asked three longtime couples to tell us the secrets of their success, and offer advice on how to stick together in the face of adversity or temptation.

One of our pairs had lots in common but was platonic for years before falling in love. Another relationship, forged in the hardship of a wartime internment camp, led to a life filled with exciting travel but also much time apart. A third was a case of love at first sight that had to wait for more than 30 years—and a change in state law—before it could be celebrated in marriage.

Take it from the relationship veterans: Romance isn’t just for kids.

Bill and Nancy Larmer, Walnut Creek
Both age 82. Married 58 years.

When Bill was editor of the Piedmont High School newspaper and classmate Nancy was associate editor, boys and girls were not allowed to be in a schoolroom together after hours. This was the mid-1940s, after all. So when they were producing The Piedmont Highlander after school and on weekends, Bill would set the type in the print shop and then stand outside and pass Nancy page proofs through a window. She would proofread them and pass them back.

It was a good working relationship, but they were just friends, and continued that way when they both went on to Stanford.

“We went on one date in college, but I wasn’t too impressed,” recalls Nancy, who has the same bright smile and perky short haircut she’s always had, except now her hair has turned white. “He was telling me how he and his buddies injected gin into a watermelon. I was prim and proper and didn’t approve of such things.”

Bill had one year of Stanford Business School under his belt before joining the Navy, and Nancy earned her teaching credential and began teaching elementary school. Concerned she’d “never get a man,” as she puts it, working as a teacher, she saw an ad in the paper and decided to go to Hawaii and try her chances there.

Time-tested: After meeting in an Arkansas relocation camp during World War II, Mich and Don Hisaka (top, at home in Berkeley today; bottom, in Cleveland in 1965) have been married for 61 years. Top photo by David Wilson. Bottom photo courtesy Don and Mich Hisaka.

In Honolulu, she moved into an apartment with some other young teachers and got a job at the Moana Hotel, serving as the night cashier. She ran into a girlfriend from Stanford who asked if she knew that Bill Larmer was stationed in Pearl Harbor, and gave her his number at the base. They went on their first date on July 9—his birthday—and found “a spark that we hadn’t realized was there.” Three weeks later, they were engaged.

“Being with him was like being home,” Nancy says, trying to explain why her feelings had changed. “We had both matured, and I had loosened up.”

“She was ready and I was ready,” says Bill, who with his warm manner and easy laugh exudes an irrepressible enthusiasm. They flew home at Christmastime, were married at the Piedmont Community Church on January 2, 1953, and honeymooned at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.

Not long after they returned to Honolulu, Bill shipped out to Korea for six months. Nancy moved into Navy housing and landed a job at Punahou School (alma mater of President Obama). “I went back to teaching once I got the man,” she says with a chuckle. Back in California, and after they had two sons, John and Andy, Nancy did substitute teaching and home tutoring. Later, she went on to launch career centers at five schools in the Acalanes Union High School District. She retired in 1990.

After the Navy, Bill finished Stanford Business School. The family settled in Walnut Creek, where he took over his father’s hardware store. But by the early ’70s, independent hardware stores were being edged out by chains like Ace, and a redevelopment plan for Walnut Creek was headed straight for his location. Bill was forced to close the store and try wholesale hardware—just as son John was heading toward his freshman year at Stanford. Times were so tough that Bill took on a paper route to pay the bills. Eventually, however, he was able to launch a successful nationwide wholesale cabinet hardware business, Cal Crystal, which he still runs from his office/warehouse in Concord. Son Andy, 51, is his partner.

Today, Bill and Nancy continue to live in the Contemporary-style one-story home that Bill built (with a contractor) in 1963. With its open-beamed ceilings and large plate-glass windows looking out over olive trees, it is the epitome of modern ’60s style.

Nancy attributes the couple’s long and successful marriage to its solid foundation—and her husband’s kindness. “It helped that we started out being best friends,” she says. “And we were raised in similar circumstances and had a lot in common. But a big part is that he has never said a harsh word to me in all these years. He has a temper, and he gets mad at what’s going on in the world, but never at me. Bill is just a very sweet person.”

She lives, she says, by the classic advice: Don’t go to bed angry. “That’s the way to go. Of course, if your husband doesn’t get mad back, it’s pretty hard to have an argument.”

“We’ve never had a real argument,” says Bill. “We both give and take. We just get along. We have a lot of mutual interests. I used to take her to a jazz club in Honolulu that featured a trombone player who used to play with Louis Armstrong. We also love to cook together. We have two fantastic kids, and both our sons do the cooking in their marriages, so I guess it rubbed off.

Struck by Cupid: Meg Brunell (seated) and Bobbie Jarvis met at a party in 1974. Here (top), they celebrate Christmas in 1975. Rich rewards: In 2009 (bottom), Brunell (left), Jarvis, and grandson Anthony Jarvis show off an award from Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Photos courtesy Meg Brunell and Bobbie Jarvis.

“We just meshed,” Bill continues, “and neither one of us ever had the seven-year itch. We’re very happy together.”

Nancy thinks they kept the romance alive by putting each other first.

“In a lot of marriages, the children come first so you’re not together as a couple so much,” she says. “Maybe sometimes we didn’t give the kids as much attention.

“We share a love of music, and there’s romance in music,” she adds. “After the kids grew up, we got into Dixieland jazz and discovered a whole new passion. We drive to Dixieland festivals, and we travel together to go see specific jazz artists we like. We’ll put music on in the car and sing along.”

When asked if her husband has changed in any ways that have surprised her, Nancy says, “I found he’s a really good caregiver. This past year I’ve been laid up with Paget’s disease, where bones don’t always heal correctly from small fractures. All of a sudden I couldn’t walk. It was in my legs and pelvis and now it’s in my shoulder. He anticipates what I want and gets it down for me.

“That’s something I never thought about—you don’t think about that when you’re first married.”

Don and Mich Hisaka, Berkeley
Age 83 and 81, respectively. Married 61 years.

Being married to a world-renowned, constantly traveling architect is not for everyone, but Mich (short for Michiko) somehow managed it.

“Don wasn’t home very often. Maybe that’s why our marriage lasted so long,” she says, pouring tea for a visitor as she delivers the zinger with understated, deadpan humor.

Don and Mich met as teenagers during World War II, in a relocation camp in Arkansas. Don was from Stockton, where his Japanese immigrant parents worked a farm on an island in the Stockton Delta. Mich was from Lodi, and her parents were barbers. When the U.S. government relocated their families, they ended up in houses across the street from each other.

Don graduated from high school in the camp, and after they were released at the end of the war, he went to Cleveland to work in a defense plant for about a year, while Mich returned to Lodi to complete two more years of high school. They had no contact and exchanged no letters. “Then one day he just appeared at our house,” Mich recalls. “I don’t know how he found my address. We started going out right away.”

“I didn’t like working in the fields in the hot sun, so I thought there’s got to be a better way,” says Don, sporting a bright purple pullover that reflects a professional’s eye for color. “So after one summer in the fields I enrolled at the junior college at the University of the Pacific. I worked as a houseboy for a couple of teachers. I worked a year there and they told me to go to U.C. Berkeley. I worked as a houseboy to make money when I went to Berkeley, too, about a block from where I live now.”

They were married in 1949, during Don’s senior year at Cal, where he studied architecture. He graduated in 1950 and worked “a year or two” before driving across the country with Mich to start graduate school on scholarship at Harvard, where he would later teach. “That was a rough ride,” Mich recalls. “The highways were just two lanes. They didn’t have superhighways, and not too many motels. We just drove and drove.”

Mich worked at the university and then at a bank while Don was at Harvard—“I had to work so he could go to school,” she says—and when he started his own architectural firm, she helped him out at the office for the first four years, when they had “no cash flow.”

After Harvard, the family moved to Detroit, where for seven years Don worked for the renowned architect Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center. A Fulbright Grant and a Wheelwright Fellowship from Harvard allowed him to travel and study architecture abroad. After a year in Rome with their girls, Miya and Mari (then 2 and 4), Mich came home with the children. Don went on to travel east through Greece and Iran to Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Mich did not build a career of her own, but says she has no regrets. “I tried to help him out as much as I could,” she says. “And when he was traveling, I could be there. We had some hard times, because it was always up and down in his field. We did what we had to do.”

The family lived in Boston for 20 years, with Don commuting to work in Washington, D.C., and then in Cleveland for another 20. He also worked in Florida for a time, in Chicago for a year, and traveled internationally, building grand modernist structures, from government and university buildings to shopping malls and individual homes, all over the United States, as well as in Tokyo and Scotland. For years he ping-ponged between offices in three states. Mari, now 55, grew up to be a graphic designer, and Miya, now 53, is artistic director of the Georgetown University Dance Company in Washington, D.C.

Don and Mich returned to Berkeley in 1992 when Cal offered Don a chair in the architecture department, which he held for three years. He quickly built a striking house for himself and Mich on a lot near the Claremont Hotel, in the fire zone created by the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. Modern, bold, and spare, like all his buildings (he won the Cornerstone Award for the best urban office building of 1991 for a structure in Washington, D.C., one of nearly 50 career awards), the stark white walls are adorned with art they’ve collected over the years, including a series of three Marilyn Monroe portraits by Andy Warhol that takes up a wall in the family room.

Don continued to practice until a few years ago. In 1998, he designed the Takara Sake Museum & Tasting Room on Addison near Berkeley’s Fourth Street, transforming a big warehouse into a graceful space with four interior pavilions. Now that he’s finally retired, he’s home all the time.

“I like doing nothing more than I thought I would,” he admits. “When I was in practice, I would work seven days a week, 10 hours a day, and often travel Thursday through Sunday.”

“It’s been an adjustment for me,” says Mich, who until a few months ago was regularly playing tennis at the Claremont Hotel. That was before hip replacement surgery slowed her down a bit. But she’s recovering well.

Mich attributes her successful marriage to give and take. “We’ve matured a lot since we met and are able to withstand a lot of hardship. That’s what kept us going,” she says.

“We came from immigrant parents in Stockton and Lodi,” Don says. “I used to live in a house where rain would come right though the walls. It was like Tobacco Road. We didn’t even have a bathroom. We had to go 50 feet to the bathroom outdoors. To be able to go from that kind of poverty, somehow find my way through Berkeley and get to Harvard and Europe and the Far East—it’s a miracle. Only in this country could it happen.”

He adds that Mich “never complained once, in all these years of marriage. Isn’t that amazing?”

Meg Brunell and Bobbie Jarvis, Fremont
Age 72 and 77, respectively. Together 35 years; married in 2008.

Meg was a full-time psychiatric technician at Agnews State Hospital in Santa Clara and worked part-time at Valley Medical Center in San Jose when a young colleague invited her to his party. He knew she was gay and without a partner, and had invited a woman he thought she’d get along well with.

“That was in November, 1974,” Meg recalls. “We met again in December and started dating in January. And the night of March 4, 1975, we said to each other, ‘We think we’re meant to be,’ and we hooked up and have been together ever since.”

Bobbie was an accountant, working for a graphics company in San Jose and doing taxes on the side. She started her own enterprise in 1985, Bee Jay’s Business and Tax Service, “and it took off like gangbusters,” says Meg, who became the office manager when she retired from Agnews after 29 years. They are now in the process of closing the business.

Meg says they clicked from the beginning. “She said the first time she met me she was completely taken with me. I guess it really was love at first sight, and just has continued on through the years. We’ve never had any breakups, a few little tiffs now and then, but we’re still together through thick and thin.”

Bobbie adopted her son, Jeff Jarvis, during a previous relationship. He’s now 45, and thanks to him, Meg and Bobbie have four grandchildren—two boys and two girls—and a great-grandson and great-granddaughter. “And we have lots of nieces and nephews,” Bobbie adds.

Meg attributes the success of their relationship to Bobbie’s easygoing disposition. “The number one thing is the extremely loving, patient nature of Ms. Bobbie Jarvis. She’s a Capricorn. I’m a Leo, which are fiery, extremely emotional and outgoing. She’s more quiet and on a steady path, and I’m crazier. So it’s been a good balance.”

Bobbie says the key was learning to discuss differences of opinion. “That’s one thing that was difficult for me,” she says. “But we worked that out, so we could talk things out if they became a problem. That has taken care of it.”

Meg says the only problem she has experienced as a gay woman was with her mother, who found lesbianism hard to accept but eventually came around. However, Meg admits, she was “pretty closeted” most of her life, except with a few friends and co-workers.

Bobbie, on the other hand, moved to San Francisco in the ’50s, at age 18, and was part of the lesbian bar scene, which was monitored by the police. “Bobbie told me there was a rule that women had to wear at least two articles of women’s clothing or they could be arrested, so she had to make sure she always wore a bra and panties in case she was picked up by the cops,” says Meg.

“I never drank, and I hated the smoke, so I never went to the bars when I was young. Later, after Bobbie and I were together, I went with her sometimes, and we would dance. I was always a great dancer. People would applaud us when the song was over. Now I’ll still go out and bop to the music in my walker.

“If I had my life to do over, I would have come out much earlier,” she says.

Seventeen years ago, Meg found a community when she and Bobbie attended a meeting of gay seniors at a shopping mall in San Leandro. That was the birth of Lavender Seniors of the East Bay, a nonprofit group that doesn’t have a fixed membership but rents office space from the San Leandro Community Church, sends out 300 to 400 newsletters a month, and holds a monthly potluck that draws 30 to 50 gay men and women.

A few years later, when the Fremont Argus did a story on the group, Meg asked that the reporter not use their names or the name of their business to avoid causing stress to any of their clients. “But after the article described two women wearing Birkenstocks and pink lipstick who owned a business,” Meg remembers, “for the next week so many clients asked us if that was us in the paper. So over the years we’ve gotten more open.”

In 2008, when it became possible, briefly, for same-sex couples to marry legally in California, the window opened just as Meg was nearing her 70th birthday. As Meg tells it, about two weeks before the big birthday party the couple was planning, Bobbie said, “My goodness, Meg, while we have all our friends and family gathered together, why don’t we get married?”

“So in two weeks we threw together the marriage plans on top of the birthday plans,” Meg recalls, “and it was a wonderful, unforgettable affair with 100 people, including many of our clients. We had so much fun. So we’re legally married now, and are watching with great interest to see where Prop. 8 ends up.”

Bobbie’s advice to other couples on how to make a relationship last: “You have to be moral and honest. If you do that, I think it’ll work out for you.”

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Regan McMahon is a writer and book critic in Oakland.

Faces of the East Bay