Tom and Dorthy McCord celebrated 70 years of marriage July 31

The only thing more fascinating than how a Kansas boy met the Oregon girl next door is hearing about how Estacada’s Tom and Dorthy McCord have made 70 years of marriage work.

Growing up, Dorthy lived all over Oregon — moving with her family every year or two to pick fruit.

“Dad didn’t like to stay anywhere more than a year or two,” she said. “I never went to high school. I went through eighth grade at about six schools and I said, ‘that’s it.’ ”

So instead of high school, Dorthy continued picking hops and walnuts to help her family stay afloat.

For Tom, the story wasn't much different.

Born in Kansas, Tom also went to work at a young age in order to support his family. Like Dorthy, he made it as far as eighth grade before entering the work force because of an injury to his father.

“(My father) was on an oil tank that caught fire, and (he) was trying to hold it back,” he said. “He was supposed to be up there for 15 minutes, but no one came and got him, so he was up there for 45 minutes. The heat closed the lower valve of his heart and they didn’t have any surgery for that back then.”

Not only did the injury interfere with Tom's schooling, but it also caused trauma at home.

“(Dad would) have heart attacks all the time and we’d just beat on his chest,” he said. “One time, four guys took him to the doctor and the doctor said that he was dead because he didn’t have a heart beat. Then, they took him to the coroner and he woke up.

“We would just pound on his chest and rub his arms and we’d bring him back, we did that for years.”

While Dorthy admitted that she couldn’t have imagined life like that, Tom pointed out, “you would if you had to keep your dad alive.”

As the oldest of four kids and the only man able to work in his family (his brother had run away), Tom joined the Civilian Conservation Corps in Idaho before returning home to take his father’s old job as a ditch digger.

In fact, as a digger he made the same wage his father did — $1 a day.

Tom’s father eventually died at 45, and so he set off to find his mother, who had moved to Ogden, Utah, as a government worker. Eventually, she relocated to Banks, Ore., and Tom followed her.

“I was 19 when I moved out here and I met Dorthy because she was living next door to me,” he said. “I remember I had a cousin who lived upstairs from her and I was wearing the boots with steel heels and I came downstairs and onto the sidewalk and I just slipped and fell. She said, ‘go ahead and kill yourself.' ”

So at age 19, Tom started “going together” with Dorthy, who was 18 at the time.

Six months later, the pair married on July 31, 1942.

“We knew each other for about six months, but this was war time so things were different,” Dorthy said. “We got married before he went into the service because they weren’t taking people until they turned 20 years old.”

For Tom, the love he felt back then is as fresh as ever.

“I just loved her,” he said. “That’s the only girlfriend I really had. I had a lot of them that I fooled around with, but I loved her so I wanted to marry her.”

For Dorthy, the memory is similar.

“It’s the same thing. You just see somebody and then you fall for them,” she said.

For the newlyweds, the honeymoon didn’t last long as Tom was called into the service just four months after their marriage.

During the war, Tom served as in the military police and was stationed in Georgia. He was later transferred to Mississippi where he helped control the coal strikes and serve as riot control.

Eventually he was shipped to Italy and Africa, where he helped move war prisoners from camp to camp.

In 1944, Tom was transferred back to San Francisco as the war ended and he got to experience something he had spent months waiting for — he was introduced to his first daughter.

Since entering the service, Dorthy had given birth to the couple’s first child in March of 1943, meaning Tom missed nearly the first 18 months of his daughter's life.

“She moved back in with her folks while I was gone, out here in Estacada on Springwater Road,” Tom said. “When I was in San Francisco, she would come down and see me, but her mother would always find some sort of emergency that required Dorthy to come back home.”

Finally, in Nov. 1945, Tom was discharged from the military service and he moved back to Oregon to be with his wife and child.

“I did anything I could for work when I got home,” he said. “I had worked in the shipyards as a welder until I went into the service, so when I came out I welded and everything. I’ve done so many jobs you wouldn’t believe.”

So after coming home to Estacada initially, the couple has moved into and out of Estacada numerous times, before ultimately staying here for good.

The couple went on to have eight children — four boys and four girls — half of whom were born in Oregon and half of whom were born during their stay in southern California.

From those eight kids, Tom and Dorthy have an astounding 34 grandkids, 74 great-grandkids and six great-great-grandkids.

So many, in fact, that they admitted that Christmas presents had become too expensive to bear.

For Tom and Dorthy, however, eight kids of their own was almost too much to bear for part of the time.

“Eight kids takes a lot of money,” Dorthy said.

“I would work on oil wells where I would work on for 12 hours and then off for 12 hours,” Tom said. “Looking back though it wasn’t that bad, at the time we just didn’t appreciate a lot of things.”

In fact, with 70 years of marriage in the books, Tom and Dorthy have done a lot of looking back lately. Now that they’re both 89 — only separated in age by a few months — the couple says the key to maintaining their marriage for so long is simple.

“When you get mad, you say things,” Tom said. “It’s best just to get out of the house while she stays in the house. Pretty soon, you’re coming back in or she’s coming out and you’re putting your arms around each other and saying you’re sorry.”

While 70 years of marriage is something to be proud of, the 89 years of health that they’ve both experienced is definitely something to be thankful for.

Other than Tom’s prostate cancer diagnosis last year, which has completely gone away, the couple has been blessed with clean bills of health.

In fact, both still work a little bit for gleaners in Estacada. Tom does some maintenance around the office while Dorthy does some office work.

In their free time, the pair still enjoys to fish, going to the coast and playing bingo in Portland.

“You just go on from day to day like always,” Dorthy said. “It has been a good 70 years.”