12th in a series on long marriages

Mike and Pat Meierhenry both grew up on farms. They met in college at a fraternity dance, where Pat asked her date why Mike was dancing with one hand in his pocket. Her date explained that Mike had lost the use of his left arm from polio—but he still went home to farm on the weekends. Pat wondered how he managed farm work with only one arm. Later, Pat and Mike double-dated, and in September 1960 they married, “between haying and corn-picking.”

The Utah state Senate unanimously voted Tuesday to ease the penalties for polygamy. The bill would treat the practice as an infraction similar to a parking ticket with punishment limited to a maximum $750 fine and community service hours. The bill now moves to Utah’s House of Representatives.

A husband and wife team of police officers had an unexpected date night activity: stopping a robbery. Detective Chase McKeown and Officer Nicole McKeown were off duty and eating at a Raising Cane’s restaurant in Louisville, Ky., on Saturday when a gunman threatened the cashier, WAVE-TV reported.

When Steffen Schwarz proposed marriage to his girlfriend, he didn’t intend his message to go out to a worldwide audience. The 32-year-old part-time farmer planted his cornfield in Huettenberg, Germany, to spell out “Do you want to marry me?” in German and convinced his girlfriend to fly a drone overhead last May to see it.

(11th in a series on long marriages)

Stephen and Sherry Collins had been married five years when, in 1980, difficult circumstances led them to Christian faith. On bed rest while pregnant with the couple’s second baby, Sherry, a Jew, watched the film Jesus of Nazareth on TV. After giving birth, she read the Bible during her hospital recovery and became convinced Jesus was the Messiah.

I spent Christmas week visiting my fiancé David’s hometown in Bismarck, N.D. His parents had requested that we visit them there this Christmas, because David’s 96-year-old grandfather Willis recently had a stroke and we suspected he might not be around for next Christmas. 

(Tenth in a series on long marriages.)