Gary: “I saw Helen at a dance and made up my mind that she was going to be my girlfriend. She didn’t like that and wouldn’t have anything to do with me for the longest time. I knew her daddy and would go home with him, but she’d leave. After a while, she kind of got used to the idea. We were 16.”

Helen:  “You’ve got to understand, I was raised in Ocean Springs. Gary was raised in Biloxi. He was a fisherman’s son, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him.”

Gary:  “I come from The Point in Biloxi where nobody wanted anything to do with us. It was a clannish community of fishermen and a wonderful place to grow up, but a lot of folks just had a bad feeling about us. We were nice, polite, and generous, but we took no bull. That reputation went with anybody who was from there.

Growing up, I worked with my dad. I was the first one in my family to graduate high school. Daddy was born in 1915. Mama was born in 1920. At that time in that community, you went to the fifth grade and then went to work. Daddy had been on a fishing boat since he was 15. Mama had me when she was 15. I worked on a boat during the holidays and summer. It was understood that as soon as I quit school, I had a permanent place on the boat. But Dad worked me like a rented Buick on the boat. He wanted me to hate the boats–he accomplished that.”

Helen and I got married when we were 18. We graduated in June and married in July. Her daddy got me a job as a cable puller at Ingall’s shipyard, the lowest job there. I cleared $52 a week, and Helen had a little job at Keesler Air Force Base, making a few dollars a week. We had a few clothes. No job. No house. But we started making it on our own.”

Helen: “We lived in an 18-foot trailer after we got married.”

Gary: “I had a few little jobs, then went to work with the L&N Railroad. I stayed with them for 42 years. I was a conductor, working the trains between Mobile and New Orleans. Sometimes we worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week. My job was to make enough money to keep the family going. If Helen needed more money, I worked more hours. She did an excellent job of handling the money. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have been in the poorhouse. She knew how to shop for bargains and make clothes.”

Helen: “I raised the children because he worked all the time. We had five kids. One passed away when she was eight. Our kids loved to travel, and we took them all over the United States on our vacations. We loved traveling so much that when we retired, we sold our house and bought an RV. I found our first motorhome. We spent 18 years on the road.

Gary: “We had four RVs during those 18 years. The last one was a 40-foot with four slides. Had everything that you could have in an apartment. It was wonderful to travel in. We set out from April through October, then came back and parked for the winter. 

We picked a direction and just took off. We didn’t worry about where we were going next. It wasn’t important if we went 50 miles or 500 miles. When it was time to stop, we just pulled over.”

Helen: “We would stop and somebody would tell us about something going on. We would have to go see it.

Gary. “We let the locals tell us what to do. We saw a tug of war across the Mississippi River between opposing towns across from each other in Mississippi. They did it every year. We stayed at a city park in Bismarck, North Dakota, and someone said we had to see the rodeo. We drove up to the gate with money in my hand to pay. A little Indian girl came out and said, ‘Welcome, put your money away. You’ll be our guest. We honor our elders.’ They put a gold band on us, and we were treated like royalty everywhere we went. It was such a  beautiful thing.”

Our number one trip in 18 years was meeting up with a group in El Paso and driving the coaches to Chihuahua, Mexico. We loaded the rigs onto flatcars and spent 16 days crossing Mexico. They never traveled over 10 or 15 miles an hour, and we got to see the country. They would put our train on a sidetrack, then buses took us to town. That was a fantastic trip.”

We’ve been all across the United States, coast to coast. We spent from June to September in Alaska and left because a big storm was coming over. We love Nova Scotia–the people are the nicest you’d ever want to meet. If we were able, we would go back there.

Helen: “We became friends with dulcimer players at a music festival in Michigan and went up there every year for at least ten years. But that’s where I found out I had cancer.”

Gary: “I took her to the emergency room in Cadillac, Michigan. They said she had lymphoma and had to get back to Mobile. Cancer slowed us down, and we couldn’t travel like we used to. We bought a little house right across from the RV park.”

Helen “When COVID hit, I told Gary I was going to buy another motor home. He didn’t want one. I was going to be a part of my grandchildren’s lives, but I wasn’t going to fly or stay in a motel. So I found the little RV we have now. He tried to talk people into not selling it to us. We go out in it about once a month when the walls start closing in. We’re still having fun. Just not far away.”

Gary:  “We never would have lived this long if we hadn’t traveled. We were active—walking to waterfalls, down trails, across the desert, seeing things, going to festivals, up mountains. We stayed on the move.”

Helen: “I didn’t want to miss anything. People say I can’t be 88 years old, but I am.”

Gary: “You can see why we stayed together for 70 years. We didn’t just sit around and stare at each other.”

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Bonus story

Gary: “I loved polishing the rocks we collected on the trip. I belonged to the Gem and Mineral Club and did a little cutting on their machines. I told Helen that I’d love to have a cutting machine of my own. I walked in on Father’s Day and there was one sitting on the table and I said, we don’t have that money to do this.”

Helen: “He pitched a fit. But I was teaching at a Montessori school and had squirreled away all my money. I’m really good at doing that. That’s why we were able to retire.”

Gary: “I opened a jewelry store on Old Shell.  I’d open the store in the morning and work there until two. Then change into my work clothes and work at the railroad from three to eleven. I would get a few hours’ sleep and do it again. I had the jewelry store for five years. It put our kids through college. Then Helen said we needed to close it because it was time to travel. We educated and sacrificed for our kids, but when they were on their own, we were on our own.”