The article isn’t online, and I don’t have a scanner to upload the paper version onto my computer. So I will type out the article. It’s about a couple who had been married 74 years.
Jeanette and Louis Steve of Groton mark 74th Valentine’s Day as wife and husband
When Louis Steve’s Alzheimer’s disease took a turn for the worse a couple of years ago and he had to go to a nursing home, Jeanette Steve knew right away she’d be moving with him.
Her 90-year-old body and mind were healthy, but she couldn’t bear the thought of being away from the man she had loved deeply for more than 70 years.
“That’s the most important thing – being together,” Jeanette, 92, said Monday, massaging her 96-year-old husband’s hand as he slept in his rocking chair beside hers.
That thought has guided the couple’s love since they first started dating 75 years ago, and reinforces itself today, on Valentine’s Day.
While many couples grow apart over the years, or break up after a setback, the Steves’ is a story of continuous faith, love and patience, even during the toughest of times.
The couple, who just celebrated their 74th anniversary on Groundhog Day, first met at a dance in Ithaca 75 years ago. Jeanette was just 16, but she told her 20-year-old admirer she was 17, just to ensure he’d still want to date her.
“I didn’t want him to think I was too young,” she said.
They immediately hit it off and started dating. Jeanette still remembers the lengths to which Louis would go to see her, walking two or three miles from his home on the north side of Ithaca to her home on the west side.
“The first night he had to walk up the middle of the road because it was so snowy,” she remembered.
The couple built a life together, raising a son and daughter.
They moved around to different locations in the region, including Cayuga Lake, Trumansburg and Watkins Glen, and Louis held a variety of jobs during the course of his life, ranging from a toolmaker to a motel owner to a saddle shop owner.
Her husband never stopped learning, Jeanette said, and that made such experiences as vacations fun. They would always investigate new things together, whether it was the opera house in Nashville or roadside restaurants during drives to California to visit their son.
“It was a challenge every time you started something different,” Jeanette said. “You never knew what was going to happen.”
She said other happy memories included sitting around a fire with friends by their trailer on Cayuga Lake and eating Italian pastries and drinking beer, fishing with her husband and her dad, raising ponies together and the completion of the couple’s first home, which Louis built.
“We’ve done about everything anyone would want to do,” she said.
Now that Louis has Alzheimer’s, can’t hear well and is losing his sight, he has stopped being himself, Jeanette said, losing interest in things and sleeping a lot.
But that doesn’t keep the couple from spending almost every minute of the day together, said Debbie Hubbard, activities director at the Groton Nursing Facility where the couple lives.
“They go to all of the activities together,” she said. “Where one goes, the other goes. You could tell it was special from the day they came in. They’re always holding hands.”
Patricia Scott, the couple’s daughter, who is 72 and lives in Freeville, said her parents are the same when she visits them twice a week at the nursing home as she always remembers them being.
“They need each other, I guess,” she said. “They’re two halves of a whole. It’s been that way for 74 years.”
Jeanette said the best part about being with her husband in the nursing home is being able to sleep beside him at night. Prior to bed, they hold hands and talk for a couple of minutes.
Then they say their prayers, he takes out his hearing aid and they go to bed, she said.
“It’s a comfort,” she said. “I just get as much comfort out of it as he does. I’m so thankful to God we have each other.”
