He put his arm around her and the crowd cheered
June Kuckens and James Lawrence were 16, movies were 25 cents, and they agreed to go on a blind date. Part way through the film, as James put his arm around June, moviegoers a few rows behind them stood up and started cheering for him. The leader of the rowdy crowd was their matchmaker, James’ cousin and June’s best friend, who, unknown to June and James, was sitting near them in the theater.
It was 1937, in East Rockaway, N.Y. The incident didn’t stop James from asking June out again, or deter her from accepting. “We went out two or three times and that was it. … We started going steady when we were 16,” June says.
They have been going steady for 81 years. “We walked everywhere,” June says — movies, roller skating, to dances at church or to somebody’s house where they would dance more. Attending the same high school, they tried dating other people, June says. “But, after two days, we said, ‘Enough of that.’ We loved one another.”
After graduating, June turned down the opportunity to study music at a university because “I didn’t want to leave Jimmy.” She studied culinary arts and opened a tea room called Spinning Wheels, where she made and served soup and sandwiches for 35 cents, filled orders for bridge clubs, and was hailed for her lemon chiffon pie and three-layer cakes. James began working in the textile industry. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army Air Force, the precursor to the U.S. Air Force. Early in 1942, he left for training, but on a short break in November, he came home and proposed to June, though he had no idea when he would be back again to get married.
June had her wedding dress made and ready for the day James returned. That day didn’t arrive until a year later. She met him at Penn Station in New York, they went to their town hall to obtain a marriage certificate the next day, and on Dec. 5, 1943, they were married in the church June attended. James had 20 days to report to his next station in Boise, Idaho, which freed them to have a honeymoon in Manhattan for a week. June took a train to Boise soon after James reported back to duty, but it was only a few weeks before he was shipped off to southern Italy, and she returned home to New York.
James served as a flight engineer in a B-24 bomber, and on his 13th mission, the windshield of the plane was shot, incapacitating the pilot and navigator. James, with a 5-inch piece of shrapnel embedded in his stomach, knew how to fly the plane, and took over the controls. He was awarded with a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart for saving the crew and returning the plane to a safe base.
After surviving more than 50 missions, he returned home, where June was about to have their first child, a daughter. They lived with his mother and soon bought the neighbor’s house, June says. James went back to working in textiles, and June stayed home to raise their daughter and son, who was born four years later. By 1953, James was tired of spending so much of his time riding the Long Island Rail Road to New York City for work. He and June packed up and left their close-knit, extended families to buy an old colonial home and barn on 56 acres in the New Preston section of Washington, Conn. They fixed up one side of the house for June’s parents to join them, and James continued working in textile management. When his company was bought out, the family moved to Ashfield, Mass., and fixed up another 15-room house with a carriage house. That house, now a bed and breakfast, is on the Mohawk Trail, where “there were more trails than people,” their daughter Ellen Adams says.
“I haven’t been sitting still,” June says. “When my husband was painting, I was painting. When my husband was raking leaves, I was out there raking leaves.”
“They wouldn’t let us help on the houses. I was very upset about that,” Ellen says, but, thanks to her mother, “I was making scratch cakes when I was 8” and “I learned how to wallpaper just watching my father.”
Their son James was allowed to paint when he was a teenager, and “I learned how to do electrical and plumbing” work, he says. The family had moved multiple times back and forth between New Preston, Massachusetts and Florida, by the time their son was in high school, reflecting the relocations of the textile companies to the South and overseas. In 1968, James’ former boss started a new company in Waterbury and asked James to work with him, which brought them back to Connecticut until 1986, when June and James retired to Florida.
Throughout their many endeavors fixing up old houses, June knit sweaters, hats and mittens by the hundreds, and made dresses and play clothes out of scrap textiles that James brought home from the mills. James built furniture, hutches, shelving and dollhouses, which their children and grandchildren are happy to have today. June and James also gathered with friends in a couples club, hosting holiday-themed parties, scavenger hunts, and dancing and playing cards. As June and James moved, their extended family migrated to Connecticut and Massachusetts, too, providing cousins as playmates for their children, and huge gatherings for the holidays.
“We didn’t have a lot of money,” June says, but one of her most beloved belongings is a small carving of two overlapping hearts that James made for their 28th anniversary bearing the message: “Darling June: My Wish — May we have 28 years more — and just like the last!! And again 28 and again and again! All my love, Jim 12-5-71.”
It is well past the “28 years more,” and June and James, now 97, are celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary today with their son and daughter and their growing family. Their granddaughter Jennifer Boynton, Ellen’s daughter, is the only one who lives in Connecticut, and she tries to bring James, who is in the VA residence in Rocky Hill, to see June, who has been in Vernon Manor for the last two years after two falls landed her in a wheelchair. “To this day, my mother and father are each other’s best friends,” their son James says. Ellen and James live in Maine and Pennsylvania, respectively.
“You are still my wife?” James says, semi-questioning June, whenever he sees her. With her girlish twinkle still in her eyes, June shows she remains enthralled to be his wife. “Every time we get together, he holds my hand the whole time,” she says — still the steady sweethearts they were at age 16.