Herman Griffin doesn’t need a whole sentence to sum up his 78 years of marriage to his wife Jeanice. He can do that in one simple word: “Perfect,” he said, gazing at her as she slept next to his leather reclining chair.
Since he met her 80 years ago when her church group invited him to a picnic, he hasn’t gone a day without seeing her.
“When they invited me, I told them I didn’t have a car,” he said. “It was the height of the Great Depression, after all. But suddenly this girl steps forward and says, ‘Well I do. I’ll take you.’ And that was that.”
Jeanice was spunky, he said. Still is, in fact, he added. How else could you explain her refusal to give up with diseases that, as he puts it, “could take down a horse”?
But that isn’t how Herman Griffin remembers her.