Love, honor, cherish

These neighborhood couples have made their marriages last

This is not a good time for marriage in America. Fewer people make the commitment to marry than ever before. Where 72 percent of Americans older than 18 were married in 1960, only about 51 percent were married in 2011, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. And it is estimated that as many as half of all marriages will end in divorce. For some of us, lasting marriages are a mystery. But these two neighborhood couples, generations apart, found love and never let go.

Jacob and Joyce Locke

Married: June 29, 1950 offspring: Four children, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren

Thefirst time Jacob saw Joyce, it was a warm summer day in Paris, Texas, in 1949.

“I was walking to the corner drugstore,” he says. “She and two of her girlfriends were sitting in a booth by the window.”

It may sound corny, Jacob says, but he was “smitten from the start, really and truly.”

He was tall and handsome, the son of a sharecropper and one of five siblings. She was an only child, petite and pretty.

For Joyce, it was not love at first sight, but she was interested.

“I had a girlfriend who was wanting to be introduced to Jacob,” she recalls. “So because that girlfriend was so interested in him, I was, too. She never did like me after that.”

They attended a volleyball game together at Lake Crook that night. Courtship was difficult because they lived at opposite ends of town, and they often tied up the town’s party line talking on the phone. Joyce worked as an office manager in Paris, earning $18.50 a week. But Jacob had only ever worked on the farm. He had no car, no job, no money.

It is a testament to his charm that Joyce agreed to marry him anyway. They wed at the West Paris Church of Christ, and a few of their friends were there, but no family. In fact, Joyce’s mother was against the union.

“She always said they would never make it,” says Joyce and Jacob’s daughter, Jerri Locke. “If she was alive today, she would still be saying that.”

The couple took an apartment a block from the Paris town square. And they bought a 1934 Chevrolet for $65, on payments. Joyce brought home the bacon, but neither of them knew how to cook. Every night, they ate pork and beans, fried potatoes and Spam, they recall.

Joyce was paid every Saturday.

“Each of us would get a comic book, an RC cola and a peanut patty,” Jacob says. “That was our big Saturday night.”

The Lockes moved to Dallas in August 1951, where they both found work. They