CHEYENNE — Arden White was a man with a plan. He knew the target of his would-be affection would be headed to her college class.
“I just waited until I saw she was coming around the corner,” he said. “I asked if she’d go out with me. Oddly enough, she said yes.”
“He ambushed me!” recalled his wife, Betty, on the occasion of their 75th wedding anniversary a week ago.
The party was arranged at their Cheyenne home by their three children, Gary, Sharon and Ann.
They dated for about a year at Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College, now Colorado State University, in Fort Collins.
Then Arden made an announcement to his girl and his family. The conflict between the United States and Korea was heating up, and he’d decided to follow some of his friends and join the Navy.
Arden was stationed at Treasure Island, California, a man-made island in the San Francisco Bay. The Navy put him to work as a keypunch operator, using an early data entry system that had people punch holes into cards, encoding information for computers.
It was a specialized clerical job, and virtually assured him that he wouldn’t be reassigned to a battleship. He spent the duration of the war at Treasure Island.
Popping The Question
While home on leave, Arden popped the question: “I think I’m going to be there for a long time, so why don’t we get married?”
“I said, ‘Sure,’” Betty recalled.
That didn’t sound like the parents who raised her, said Ann, the baby of the family, who was born in 1966. She was preceded by Gary in 1953 and Sharon in 1956.
“I remember them being pretty strict and having everything planned out, and they never wavered,” said Ann. “So for them to be so willy-nilly and spontaneous doesn’t fit with the memories I have of them.”
Guess they must have been in love, as they clearly still are. Their children are happy they put together the party, inviting family and friends to share their special day. Betty had copies of several family histories she’d put together for guests to take home.
Betty and Arden were married in 1951, in her family’s church in Eaton, Colorado. They were both 20, but Arden’s mother had to go to the courthouse and officially give her permission for the marriage to take place. Girls only had to be 19.
“Discrimination!” Betty said, laughing.
Then they moved to Berkeley, California, and he returned to his stint in the Navy. Moving halfway across the country wasn’t something people in her family normally did, but Betty said, “I was kind of the maverick in the family. Everyone else stayed close to home.”
Back To School
Arden was supposed to serve for four years, but he had other ideas about his future.
“I asked for an early release,” he said. “I wanted to finish my bachelors degree back in Colorado, and so did Betty.”
One day his chief walked by and tersely said, “Well, you got it.”
“I said, ‘What did I get?’ and he said, ‘Your early release.’ He was not pleased,” Arden remembered.
But the Whites sure were. Betty earned her bachelor's degree in home economics. Arden graduated too and took some correspondence classes by mail. The G.I. Bill had helped him pay for his education, and he had decided to pursue a master’s degree so he could teach at the high school level.
The couple and their son Gary moved to Kansas, where Arden got a job teaching at a high school. That’s where Sharon was born. Then the family moved to Greeley, Colorado, where he received his master’s degree in education at Northern Colorado.
“I found out I was doing rather well academically, so I had the idea, ‘Let’s see if they’ll let me apply for a doctorate.’ And they let me do it.”
Arden needed a job and found one teaching at Northern State College in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He liked everything but the cold winters and hot summers. He hated the climate, and so did his family.
Betty was a bit more diplomatic. She didn’t scrunch up her nose at the thought of their two years there.
“Aberdeen was a lovely place to live,” she said. “But the climate was terrible.”
Then the college’s main building was destroyed by a fire.
“That was the end of that,” Arden said.
He began looking for another job.
One day Arden was at a golf course when a friend told him there was a vacancy at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
“Well, that suited me — the location did," he said. “They asked me to come for an interview.”
He had one of his sisters-in-law give him a ride from Aberdeen to Cheyenne, then caught a bus for the trip over the hill to Laramie. After the interview he flew back to South Dakota just in time to make it to a class he was teaching.
‘Yes, I’ll Take That’
At 9 a.m. Monday his phone rang. “They said, ‘Would you take the job for this (amount)?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll take that,’” Arden said. So the family packed up again, but they wouldn’t leave for a long time — 30 years.
While he was at the College of Education, Betty was a stay-at-home mom when their children were young. As they grew older, she took a job working in the UW athletic department ticket office.
Arden was promoted to the head of the counselor education program. It’s a job he said he enjoyed, especially when he could combine it with his love of fly fishing in the Snowy Range.
“He could go out in the afternoon, catch some trout and be home by dinnertime,” Betty said.
Arden and his boss referred to their fishing trips as their “department head meeting.”
Betty learned to fish, but said she wasn’t good at it “because I needed help getting the fish off the hook. But I really enjoyed the Snowies.”
By the time Ann came into the picture, her family had a routine of hiking, camping and fishing and she did not get to vote on her participation.
“They took me on one camping trip when I was 3 or 4, and I was such a pain in the ass, I remember someone ended up carrying me because I refused to walk anymore,” Ann said.
“That was me,” Gary reminded her.
“Their idea of camping was you park your car and you hiked with all of your stuff — the tent, the sleeping bags,” Ann continued while her siblings chuckled. “They ate the little powdered food, caught and ate the fish, and I’m not any of that. They still went, but they just shipped me off to my grandparents in Ault for a week.”
Wonderful Parents
Despite not sharing her parents’ love of the outdoors, though, she said they were wonderful.
“Dad always made sure we went to church every Sunday and spent the day together,” Ann said. “They never fought. They never argued. And they never swore. Well, Dad did sometimes when he was golfing.”
Despite their parents’ passion for college, Gary said they didn’t insist that they get degrees.
“But Dad was always focused on us all having a job,” Gary said.
He discovered that he loved working in agriculture, and went to work at UW’s greenhouse and planted flowerbeds on campus.
After visiting some friends at CSU, Gary approached his father and asked if he could go to school there.
“He told me as long as I could graduate in four years, he’d help me out,” he recalled. “It took getting some credits in the summer, but I did it.”
Sharon left Laramie when she was 19. She saw someone she liked in a band and told her friends, “I’m going to marry that guy.”
Sharon went to Cheyenne and it took a week, but she found him. They’ve been married for 49 years.
After Arden retired from UW, he and Betty stayed in Laramie for a few years before moving to Cheyenne. Gary lives in Powell, and Ann moved to Illinois.
The Whites have enjoyed traveling together, with their best memories being Washington, D.C., and New York City. Asked what she saw at the former, Betty said, “Everything. The Smithsonian. The Washington Monument. The White House.”
On two trips to the Big Apple, the couple saw eight plays. The first one was “Cats.”
“There was one I had no idea what was happening,” Betty said. “It was a man on a ship and he was talking loudly and he spit all over himself. That’s what happens when you sit in the front row.
“We don’t like to talk about that,” she added with a wry smile.
Why do they think they’ve been together for so long?
They stared at each other for a minute or so.
“She’s very accommodating," Arden said. “She was always willing to move wherever we needed to be.”
“He’s very patient,” Betty said.
“I can’t explain it. She’s brighter than me,” Arden said, and when she tried to brush off that assessment, her husband simply said, “That’s true.”
“We found out in high school she was going to be the valedictorian — until I showed up,” he added. “Her parents weren’t all that pleased with me.”
Kerry Drake can be reached at: Kerry.Drake33@gmail.com
