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Rena Ray still has the first valentine her husband gave her in 1935. And she has the second one he gave her, too. The Sunnyvale couple just celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary, and according to the staff at Belmont Village where they live in Sunnyvale, they are still lovebirds.
They met in a small Texas town, at a fish fry when he was 22 and she was 17. Within a year they married in a double wedding ceremony with friends.
"I didn't know split peas from coffee when we got married," Bill says. "But Rena has been a jewel ever since."
The couple had two children, a boy and a girl. He worked on WPA, a government-sponsored work program where he earned $15 every two weeks. Those were considered good wages when the local diner charged only 30 cents for a large breakfast.
In 1950 the couple moved to Sunnyvale where Bill was a carpenter in the Santa Clara Valley and Rena worked at the Libby's Cannery, putting cherries in canned fruit cocktail.
"We would put one cherry for each of the round openings on a metal plate that turned like a Lazy Susan over the moving cans," Rena says. Later, she worked for an electronics company making capacitors and for a pharmaceutical company packaging contact lenses.
Over the years, they've enjoyed traveling to such places as the Caribbean, the Holy Land, Switzerland and even a special trip to China.
Bill says they took the trip to China in 1988 with former astronaut Jim Irwin. He says, "Many 'off-limits' places were made accessible to our party because the Chinese respected Irwin and his accomplishments."
The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary 19 years ago at the Crosswalk Baptist Church of Sunnyvale. After all these years Rena enjoys showing off the first two Valentine's cards that Bill gave her, along with the blue-and-white chiffon handkerchief that matched her navy blue wedding dress.
"We have been a good couple," Bill says. "I think she has done more than me."
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Photograph by Cera Renault