PATRICK'S PEOPLE: The Bockelmans have a lifetime love

Laverne and Ella Bockelman have been putting up with each other for the past 71 years.

At least, she believes that’s the secret to their long and happy marriage.

“We just put up with each other, tolerate each other,” Mrs. Bockelman said. “None of us is perfect, you know.”

They were married June 1, 1941, at the Hepler Methodist Church. There was no honeymoon to speak of.

“We got married one day and I had to go to work the next day,” Bockelman said.

Both grew up in the Brazilton-Hepler area, but Mrs. Bockelman said they didn’t know each other until they were teenagers.

“The young people had some outdoor parties, and we met at one of those yard parties,” she said. “I thought he was kind of a good-looking guy.”

But her future husband didn’t pay that much attention to her at first.

“I noticed her more when she was in that play at Hepler,” he said. “I thought she was pretty good.”

The play, “Here Comes Charlie,” was presented by the Walther League, a Lutheran youth organization.

“They gave plays at  Brazilton and Hepler,” Mrs. Bockelman said. “I played the lead. I was pretty good at plays. I should have been an actress, I guess.”

For a time after she graduated from the parochial school in Hepler she did housework.

“I got $2.50 a week and my meals,” she said. “They were pretty good meals.”

The couple lived in Wichita for several years after their marriage. World War II was raging and Bockelman worked in an aircraft manufacturing plant.

“Housing was pretty scarce,” he said. “We stayed with her uncle until we got an apartment, and then we got government housing at Plaineview. I rode a bike to work at the factory.”

After getting several deferments, Bockelman finally was called to the military and went into the U.S. Navy. He served aboard the USS Wasatch, an amphibious force flagship, a floating command post with advanced communications equipment. It was designed to be used during large-scale operations, and it was.

“I was in five invasions and two occupations of Japan,” Bockelman said. “We had admirals on the ship, we even had MacArthur on board for a while, not very long.”

The sailors were able to write letters home, but they were censored to prevent any mention of where the ship was.

“I wrote and asked my wife how Phil was doing,” Bockelman said. “We didn’t know any Phil, I thought she would catch on that I was in the Philippines.”

He recalls one close call when he spotted a kamikaze plane that was stalking the Wasatch.

“I was on watch as high as you could go on that ship, the crow’s nest,” Bockelman said. “I started down the ladder, but the kamikaze saw the USS Kitkun Bay, a carrier, and hit it instead.”

He came home from the war with seven Bronze Stars. In the early to mid-1950s he worked as a foreman at the Helio Aircraft Plant near Pittsburg, until the plant closed. After that, he went back into farming.

“I went out there to see my father and thought I’d do a little plowing,” Bockelman said. “Then I thought I might as well put the crop in. I didn’t drive a tractor. We had horses and I’ve used a walking plow. I’d shuck corn by hand.”

He got so good that he won first place in the Kansas State Cornhusking Contest Men’s Golden Agers Division in 1992 and 1993. He also received a sportsmanship award at the contest in 1999.

Mrs. Bockelman was a full-time homemaker and son Wayne Bockelman recalls that she made the family’s clothing for several years. The couple always had a large garden, and she canned much of the produce.

“I remember that we took a family vacation once to Yellowstone and we took boxes and boxes of home-canned food that we cooked over the campfire,” Wayne Bockelman said. “We washed the jars out and saved them for next time.”

He said that the family was quite self-sufficient on the farm.

“We ate from the garden or home-canned produce, fish that my father caught, quail or pheasant that he hunted, or beef that he butchered,” the son said.

“We didn’t buy hardly anything in town except sugar,” Bockelman said.

He gave up having cattle in the 1980s, but farmed until three or four years ago. The couple now resides at Via Christi Village. He is 96, and she is 91.

“But we’re still walking by ourselves,” Mrs. Bockelman said.

They have four children, Charles Bockelman, Barbara Remillard, Wayne Bockelman and Don Bockelman and seven grandchildren. Bockelman calculates that there will soon be 18 great-grandchildren.

“A great-grandson will be getting married in November,” Wayne Bockelman said.

“We’re fortunate, we have this family that gets together,” his father said. “We were together last week at Table Rock Lake.”

He and his wife don’t know if they’ll make it to their 75th anniversary, but there’s one thing they’re sure about.

“We’d do it all over again,” Mrs. Bockelman said.