Wife to celebrate 89th birthday on 69th wedding anniversary

Doris Howard on Tuesday will celebrate her 89th birthday and 69th wedding anniversary.

The former Doris MacDonald and Lester Howard married Dec. 29, 1940, at the Methodist Church in Bonners Ferry. They have remained in Boundary County for much of their lives.

“Bonners has been good to both of us,” Doris Howard said. “We’ve been away a time or two, but we always came back.”

Even though health issues have slowed down Lester Howard, who turned 90 on Oct. 18, it doesn’t keep the couple from still doing things together, like going to church every Sunday.

Doris Howard said she believes the key to a long, healthy marriage is compromising.

“You have to know when to shut up and you have to give and take,” she said. “One person can’t get their way all the time because then it won’t work.”

The couple met in the fall of 1935, after Lester Howard’s family moved to Bonners Ferry from Kansas. On the first day of school during her freshman year, Doris noticed a Lester Howard because he was a new kid in the classroom.

She sent him a note and he responded.

“He didn’t look young enough or foolish enough to be a freshman,” Doris Howard said. “He was dark complected and had black pompadour hair. He looked so lonesome.”

A year later, the two went out on their first date. They went to a dance at the grange. Four years later, they married.

The Howards raised a daughter, Virginia Lee Weller of Lewiston, who will turn 67 on Thursday, Dec. 31, and a son, Robert, 66, who is a lawyer in Tulsa, Okla.

When asked what advice Doris Howard would pass onto anyone thinking about marrying, she suggested really knowing the person you’re marrying.

“Know the family and know their religion, and in this day and age, it would help to know their politics,” she said. “You have to compatible on everything. If you don’t get a long with the other side of the family, it will never be a happy marriage.”