Looking Back 20... and 70 Years

My parents were married 70 years ago today.

Here is a picture taken on that day...


















And another taken during their honeymoon in Banff. They took the train for a week away.


My mother had to return to the classroom to teach after Labor Day weekend, the first weekend in September, in Hay Lakes, Alberta.






Twenty years ago, my parents were planning to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in Edmonton, the city where they were married.

Recently going through some of my mother's papers I came across the guest list...

My father didn't want to send out invitations until after they returned from Europe in June, 1994. They were planning the trip of a lifetime, for him - going to go back to the village of his childhood in Poland. He had left at age 19 in 1929, never expecting to return. The fall of the Berlin Wall had made his return possible.

But during that holiday, after seeing the place where he had lived as a child, he contracted bacterial meningitis - and died. Not in his village in Poland, but in Juterbog, a town near Berlin where he was visiting a cousin.

Together with the guest list is the draft of the speech my mother was planning to make - at the celebration of their 50th anniversary.