7 decades after a chance meeting at a bus stop, Guy and Shelia Recla's love for each other has only grown.
Photo courtesy of Lindsey Shuey
Originally published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on February 14, 2021
POTTSVILLE - On a winter night in 1950, 15-year-old Shirley Boyer was standing with her friends on a street corner near Mount Carbon. Her mother Dorothy named her after Shirley Temple, and in childhood her acquaintances told her that she had the “curly top” of the child star. Her father ran off with another woman in the middle of the Depression, leaving Dorothy to knock on neighbors’ doors asking for milk. A young man named Guy Recla happened to be standing on the same street corner, waiting for a bus. Guy, a 21-year-old fresh out of a three-year stint in the Marine Corps, was working in a “coal hole” with his father. The baby of his family, his mother died when he was 8.
“Where are youse girls going?” Guy asked.
Shirley and her friends were going to the roller rink, and Guy was not invited.
“Can I see you again?” He asked.
“Maybe,” Shirley said.
In Sept. 2020, Guy, 92, and Shirley, 86, celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary and renewed their vows.
“It’s just like when you get married over again.” Shirley said. “It was beautiful. I have tears in my eyes now, because God was good to us.”
Guy handed her a tissue.
On their wedding day, America was made up of 48 states, human beings had not yet entered space and George VI was King of England. 14 U.S. Presidents, 115 newly independent nations, 4 children, 12 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren and one global pandemic later, the two laugh and cry as they remember their life together. Shirley is the kind of woman who calls you “honey” and ends conversations with the phrase “Have a long life and a blessed one.” Everyone, even Guy, calls her “Mom.” She thanks God for their chance meeting on that street corner. Guy still has a wicked sense of humor, but he’s serious when he says that by leaving the Marines when he did, he “missed the Korean War by a year.” He still calls Shirley his “little girl.” One of their secrets to such a long marriage is that the two never go to bed angry at each other.
“He was so good to me,” Shirley said, “and I fell in love with him. We grow old together and we love one another, and that’s how it is. I believe that God took care of me and my husband and my family.”
When the two first met, Shirley just couldn’t believe that there was a guy whose name was “Guy.”
“How ‘bout a date?” He asked her.
After Shirley got her mother’s permission, Guy ordered Shirley a milkshake and took her to a drive-in movie.
“He fell in love with me when he first saw me,” she said. “That’s what he told me.”
After six months, he asked her to marry him. Almost 16 and from a broken home, she was unsure.
“Oh no you’re not,” she told him.
“Oh yes, I’m gonna marry you,” he said. “I know it.”
Eventually, Dorothy gave her blessing. Due to Shirley’s young age, even the priest suspected it was a shotgun wedding.
“I said to God,” she remembered, “‘If I ever get married, I’ll never break my family up.’”
One thing Guy appreciates about his wife of 70 years is that she is a great cook. Shirley baked him homemade bread, sticky buns and Pennsylvania Dutch pot pie. As Guy worked on the railroad in Philadelphia and at the Bleach & Dye in Port Carbon, Shirley was briefly a lunch lady and crossing guard at John S. Clark Elementary School in Pottsville. The two used to go swimming, go to movies and dance.
“He wasn’t that good,” Shirley remembered. Guy was still doing the two-step when she was into rock and roll.
“Now that he’s older, he’s starting to forget,” Shirley said, “so I take care of him. That’s love, that’s true love. We promised we’d take care of one another. I could never put him in a home because that would break my heart.”
Every Valentine’s Day, Guy bought Shirley candy or roses. Due to the pandemic, the restaurant gatherings that they shared with the extended family have largely ceased. Guy and Shirley are planning a small gathering for Valentine’s Day this year.
“I’ll tell ya one thing,” Shirley said. “When I got married, between us, I never knew what true love was. It grows and grows as time goes by. I can’t do it without him and he can’t do it without me.”
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