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Museum-quality marriage: After 70 years together, the Bees remain honeys
By Sean Barron
GREENVILLE, PA.
If at first you don’t succeed in renewing your vows for your 70th wedding anniversary on the U.S.S. Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, try, try again.
That’s what Don and Eloise Bee did April 18, when they made a special trip to New York City for that purpose.
“We were married on Jan. 27, 1945,” Eloise said from the couple’s Oak Road residence a few days before they left. “We were to renew our vows [Jan. 27, 2015], but we didn’t go due to the weather.”
Don and Eloise chose the floating museum in the Hudson River for the occasion because of its significance in Don’s life. For most of his two years in the Navy during World War II beginning when he was 18, Don was an airplane director on the aircraft carrier’s hangar deck. The main duty for him and his crew of 16 was to move close to 100 dive bombers and other planes below the flight deck.
While serving on the U.S.S. Intrepid, Don was in combat during the Battle of Guam in 1944 and several others in the Pacific Theater.
The giant ship was launched in 1943 and decommissioned in 1974. In between, it was used in WWII and the Vietnam War, survived several kamikaze attacks and served as a recovery vessel for NASA in the 1960s.
Don recalled one frightening night when it appeared that a torpedo had struck and dinged a steel wall on one side of the 46,000-ton vessel. None of the estimated 3,200 service personnel was injured, however, and little damage occurred because the missile turned out to be a fake, he explained.
“I saw it coming and I froze. It pushed me forward, but I didn’t see any plane,” he said.
Nevertheless, what turned out to be very real was having met Eloise on a blind date. It wasn’t long before a friendship developed and love blossomed.
“A friend of mine had a date and needed a ride to Sharon, [Pa.], to see a movie,” he said. “This friend told me about Eloise and introduced us. When I went in the house, I saw that she was just beautiful; she was striking. I said, ‘I think I’m going to marry that girl.’”
On the day the couple got hitched, they submitted to a required blood test, and Don’s father called a minister to perform the service. Two days later, Don returned to the ship, recalled Eloise, a homemaker who worked in a diner and for a dry-cleaning business during the war before volunteering 30 years for UPMC Horizon Greenville Hospital.
During his service, Don dealt with bouts of homesickness, loneliness and a fear that he might not make it home. So the couple decided to write letters to each other, though his were censored so as to prevent the possibility that sensitive information might fall into enemy hands.
“For a whole year, we wrote back and forth,” he remembered.
After serving in the Navy, Don worked for the former Greenville Steel Car Co., which made railroad cars, then for the Nashville, Tenn.-based National Life and Accident Insurance Co.’s Youngstown office. Afterward, he was a maintenance foreman for the Chicago Bridge & Iron Co.’s Greenville plant for 30 years before retiring in 1983.
If you ask the two to divulge their secret for 70 years and counting of bliss and fulfillment, don’t expect a deep, philosophical explanation.
Like any couple, Don and Eloise have had disagreements, but they made a pledge to work through them and never go to bed angry with each other, she explained.
“We have a strong faith in the Lord, and we liked each other from the start,” Don said, adding that the letters they wrote back and forth also helped immensely.
As the couple celebrated earlier this month on the aircraft-carrier-turned-museum, a few family members read aloud parts of the correspondence they shared seven decades ago while he was near San Francisco.