Arlene Cole is not one to brag, or give unsolicited advice, but when you have been married for 60 years to the same man, she admits she does know a bit about marriage and, more importantly, how to make it work.
“There is love, and there is like,” she explains.
“I love him. That is why I married him,” she said.
For Arlene, him is George, her husband.
“You see,” she said as she sat across the table from her spouse, glancing at him for a moment.
“We like each other. We just like each other. We do things together. We worked together. We go on trips together. We go to the Grange together. We really like each other,” she said.
For the Coles, 60-plus years of love, or like, or whatever, began at Lincoln Academy where George, who lived just down the street from the school, met a girl from Jefferson who was boarding with a family during the week.
“I was in the Class of ’47 and he was in the Class of ’46,” Arlene said.
“We liked to do things together,” she said explaining how it was the start of a life of respect and friendship.
After graduation from Lincoln Academy, George went into the family business and she went to Colby College.
“After my junior year, we wanted to get married and I was going to go back to finish my senior year. I wanted to be a teacher,” she said.
Nine days after the wedding, the Korean War broke out and George was sure to be drafted.
“I didn’t want to leave him. After all, I might have been a widow at 21, so I dropped out of school and followed him,” she said.
Sure enough, Uncle Sam asked George to join the Army. After taking a battery of tests, and a background check, George was sent to guided missile school.
“He was on base at Aberdeen, Md., and I took a room in Baltimore. We lived on, I think it was, $90 a month,” she said. George nodded.
In Baltimore, she explained her recreation was walking around town looking in the store windows. “We didn’t have any money, so we didn’t go in the stores. We also went to the bus station and watched the people,” she said.
Before the draft caught George, the couple had purchased a lot on Academy Hill Road and started building a home, but they left it unfinished because George didn’t want to go into debt. He knew the Army pay was not very much.
“We had to pay taxes and, well, I didn’t eat a lot. I guess I lost 30 pounds when we were in Maryland, she said. “When I would take the bus to the base, the first thing he would do would be to get me something to eat,” she said.
After his initial training, George was asked to stay on with the Army’s missile program, winding up at Redstone Arsenal, now the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., working on the Corporal Program, the Army’s first surface-to-surface guided missile.
“They wanted me to stay on when my two year Army hitch was up, but I said ‘no.’ We wanted to go back home,” George said.
For the Coles, home was always located on Academy Hill in Newcastle.
Along the way, she finished her degree in history at the University of Maine while he taught physics and chemistry lab at Lincoln Academy for a while, then got the college bug and went to the University of Maine earning a BS in physics and math.
While George studied theory and math, he really was a Yankee tinkerer, a guy who liked to make things and fix things and figure out how things worked.
In a tiny shop, a shop he built, like his house, he and Arlene continued his father’s business – building a two-person production line making tiny wooden toy boats, lighthouses, strings of lobster pot buoys and other trinkets for the tourist trade. It was a wholesale business with some big time clients, George said.
Working side-by-side, they made thousands and thousands of tiny boats and other keepsakes.
“I didn’t work eight hours a day. I would get the kids off to school first then come in to work. I would work until 4 p.m. and be there when they came home from school,” she said.
Civic activities and grange work was another time for the Cole family togetherness project.
While she was active in the Newcastle and Jefferson Historical Society and was president of the PTA, he was involved in civic projects serving on the school board, the planning board, the town budget committee, and the appeals board.
In 1960, she entered a blueberry pie contest at the Union Fair and was named state champion blueberry pie baker. She got a big trophy and her picture in the paper.
“I got $100, too. It was quite a thrill. I took the $100 and bought a Jake Day painting of Mt. Katahdin. I have never been sorry I got it,” she said.
Arlene is more than a bit proud of her baking progress and the fact that she and her husband were both named Alumni of the Year by Lincoln Academy.
She also authored a history of Newcastle, “Between Two Rivers,” published in 2003.
For the last 50 years, she has been a volunteer weather observer for the National Weather Bureau, NOAA and wrote a weather column for The Lincoln County News.
As they sat at their kitchen table as gold finches, chickadees and nut hatches flittered at their window bird feeder along with a rare white chickadee, Arlene offered one good piece of advice for those getting married in June.
“George said it was okay to get angry, as long as we didn’t do it at the same time,” she said.
“Remember when you said that George?” she asked.
“I said that, I did?” he replied.
Arlene just looked over her glasses and smiled.
“I guess I would urge people to marry someone with the same values that they were raised with,” she said.
George then chimed in going on how his generation stayed married, while some younger folks separated.
“I am for marriage. I remember one couple, and I’ll not call their name, got divorced after 25 years. Then they went out and danced together and celebrated the divorce – together,” he said.
“In our generation a lot more stayed married. Maybe the others did not give enough time to get to know each other,” he said.
Arlene echoed her husband’s thoughts.
“I am for marriage, too. I loved him and got married, had children and grandchildren, but I can’t tell them how to live,” she said.
The couple plans a celebration for July, when their family will gather to celebrate their 60th anniversary and Arlene’s 80th birthday.
Until then, George will do what he likes best, and putter around doing what he calls “odd ball” projects, like his Jeep tucked in the shop, or a press he would like to modify, at least some day, that is, and there is wood to be cut for the stove, and …
Arlene, on the other hand, is involved in another history project.
Not long ago, when one of her family’s homes in Jefferson was cleaned out, they found old letters outlining things that happened in her family and in rural Jefferson, from 1860 to the 1930s. She is putting them together as part of a book project.
“I got plenty to do,” she said, “I’m having a time; a wonderful time.”
