NOTE: Our wedding anniversary was on June 16th.
Mrs. Gulch lived long enough to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. I don’t think you stay together that long unless you become close friends.
We were a work romance. She was introduced to me early on a Sunday morning where I worked at the Safeway at 44th & Lowell in Denver. She was the first girl hired there to bag groceries and other duties. As the Assistant Manager and Mrs. Gulch walked away I noticed that she was holding her very long brown hair back with a hair clip made out of rawhide in the shape of a peace sign. Since this was during the Viet Nam war the peace sign was very symbolic.
We became good friends, then romantically involved, which despite some pressure to split up from her parents, we stuck it out and got married in 1973.
Read: Happy Birth Anniversary Mrs. Gulch
I think we cemented our friendship when we moved to Missoula. We really needed to depend on each other since our support folks were back in Denver. We set out in our VW bus driving to college towns, looking for a graduate school. We wandered through college towns, Laramie, Grand Junction, Pocatello, Idaho Falls, Bozeman, Butte, and then drove down the Clark Fork River, through the Hellgate, into Missoula and decided try out the University of Montana. Those western sunsets in the Rocky Mountains will get you every time.
Congratulations John!