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50 years ago, they took a chance on love

They eloped without even telling their parents, when he was 21 and she was 19. On Friday, they renewed their vows in a formal ceremony with loved ones.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published January 2, 2006

	[Times photo: Edmund Fountain]
	Elaine Fitzgerald, 69, and her husband Larry, 71, share a kiss after renewing their wedding vows on Friday. Even after 50 years, they never go to bed without kissing good night.

SPRING HILL - This love story starts with fireworks. Real ones.

July 3, 1951, Princeton, N.J., right around dusk, and a high school kid everybody called "Fitzy" was shooting bottle rockets over a pond with three of his buddies. One of the rockets landed on the roof of the house across the way and they all ran over there to say they were sorry. The pretty girl from algebra class answered the door.

A few years later, Larry Fitzgerald and Elaine Okeson eloped to Elkton, Md., where they were wed in a small, quick ceremony done by a clerk of court with a witness.

Since then, he has worked in and retired from the security industry and the electric business, and she was a nurse for 37 years. They have two children and two grandchildren, and they've lived in a few different places in New Jersey, and in Winthrop, Maine, and in Timber Pines during the winters since 1996.

Never, though, did they have a wedding celebration, the kind with a best man and a maid of honor and bridesmaids and groomsmen, and dinner and drinks and dancing, and cake and white tablecloths and fancy invitations written in script.

Until Friday night.

Their 50th anniversary.

On Dec. 30, 1955, he drove down from Nahant, Mass., where he was stationed in the Army, and stopped in Princeton to pick up a friend to be the witness, then went to Neptune, N.J., to pick her up at nursing school, and then went on to Elkton, a tiny town on the northern tip of the Chesapeake Bay. He was 21. She was 19.

They had come from different backgrounds. He was born to a broken family in the Bronx, N.Y., and she grew up in the potato fields outside Princeton. That night, though, the night before the clerk of court made them man and wife, it was cold and there was sleet and they parked his '51 Oldsmobile in a cornfield and slept.

Fitzy and Elaine didn't tell their folks for the next six months.

Go 50 years of marriage and lessons are learned along the way.

The secret?

"A good woman," Fitzy said Thursday at his home in Timber Pines. "The right choice means everything in the world."

"You've got to be willing to give and take," he said. "Sometimes more than you think you should."

"You have to have disagreements," Elaine said. "You have to have arguments. You have to be open-minded. And to have the ability to talk things over."

"And we never went to bed without kissing good night," Fitzy said.

On Friday evening, as the last of the afternoon sun came in through a tall thin window on a door, more than 100 people gathered at the Timber Pines lodge for the kind of wedding Larry and Elaine Fitzgerald had never had. The wedding party stood in a line in a hall. The women held the elbows of the men.

Fitzy and Elaine were in the back. He was dressed in a black suit with a pink shirt and tie and had on a pink boutonniere. She was in a black gown and wore a rosebud headband.

Someone in the lodge clinked on a glass with a spoon. Quiet.

People at the tables turned their heads. Then they clapped. Then they stood.

Fitzy and Elaine walked through the group to the stage.

Angie David, a friend, a neighbor and a notary public, had helped put this together. Now she read from a small piece of paper.

"Larry," David said, "do you forevermore take Elaine to be your lawful wedded wife; to love, honor, comfort her and keep her in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep you only unto her so long as you both shall live?"

"I do," he said.

"Elaine," David said, "do you forevermore take Larry to be your lawful wedded husband to live together in the holy estate of matrimony; to love, honor, comfort him and keep him in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep you only unto him so long as you both shall live?"

"I do," she said.

Everybody clapped.

Betty Lange, another neighbor, sang Always.

Larry put a new ring on Elaine's finger.

Elaine put a new ring on Larry's finger.

Angie David "repronounced" them man and wife.

Then they read to each other poems they had written.

"Elaine," Fitzy started, "Fifty years ago, you and I took a chance on love ..."

"You are my love," Elaine said at the start of hers, "and my best friend ..."

She started to cry. He put his left hand on her right shoulder. She looked up at him and then went on.

--Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified January 2, 2006, 02:30:25]