‘TIL DEATH DO US PART’

SSgt. Lelton H. Pittman, U.S. Army - WWII

            Were they still living, yesterday would have been my grandparents’ ’ 75^th wedding anniversary. Childhood friends, they were both dating other people when he joined the Army, in March of 1943. A year later, while he was back home on emergency leave for his grandmother’s funeral, they saw each other briefly at the service. They each knew that the other had recently broken up with their boyfriend/girlfriend. He asked if he could write her, and she said yes. And then he was back aboard a train headed back to California to finish his training, and then on to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese.

Margaret Clay

        Through their letters, a relationship blossomed, but then.... he’d tell you he had always been head-over-heels for her. By Christmas, he attempted to propose to her in one of his letters, repeatedly saying he had ‘a very important question to ask her’. Finally, on the last line, he chickened out, asking instead ‘did she believe in Santa Claus’? He did follow through in the next letter, and, of course, she said ‘yes’.... but he never quite lived that one down.

        As he was on New Guinea, at that time, he sent money for his parents to go pick out an engagement ring for him and take it to her. Throughout 1945, he was ‘in the thick of it’ overseas, and she was busy teaching school on an emergency teaching certificate; yet they continued to write one another every chance they got. And then suddenly, the War was over.

The week he was mustered out of the Army, his Daddy took the truck down to Birmingham to pick him up, as it was snowing so bad that the buses couldn’t risk the icy road conditions of North Alabama.  She said that they’d honked the horn three times as they passed by her house just so she’d know that they’d made it back safe. Mamaw was a worrier. Over the next week, the young couple had the only ‘dates’ they ever had before their wedding, which consisted of them sitting, surrounded by her many younger siblings, and visiting at her parents’ house each evening.

Our Beloved Mamaw

            That next Wednesday, less than a week after his return home, they stood in his parents' living room and were married.  A second snowstorm had hit the area, again making the roads practically impassable, requiring that his father go out on the tractor to bring the preacher to the house for the ceremony.

They were married for 52-years when the Good Lord called my Papaw home, in February of 1999. Mamaw would live another dozen years without him, but she never stopped missing him or loving him.

Ask any of the family what they remember most about our Mamaw and Papaw and they’ll most likely tell you it was how the two of them constantly bickered and fussed with one another about almost anything and everything imaginable. At times, it was plumb exasperating, and at others, absolutely hilarious.

Our Wonderful Papaw

            As a matter of fact, the two of them once went back and forth during a conversation, in regards to a specific length of time. Mamaw said ’18-months’, and Papaw corrected her, saying ‘no, it was a year and a half’. This went on for several, several minutes, until my Momma finally interrupted them to point out to Mamaw that a year and a half WAS 18-months. Mamaw blustered, and Papaw just grinned with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He loved to ‘get her goat’, and she was bound and determined that he wasn’t ‘always right’. Still.... that they loved one another was obvious. Who knows.... maybe the bickering banter was their ‘love language’.

Regardless, they were shining examples to their children and grandchildren of what devotion to one's spouse should be. They never gave up on one another, and the result was a partner for life. She never 'wanted' for a thing, and he was provided for like a 'king'.