Hope: Pete and June’s Story, Part 1

I climb the porch steps of Pete and June’s yellow house, greeted by a row of tomatoes and acorn squash sunning themselves on the painted railing. I comment on the bounty and Pete tells me he dropped off nine bags of tomatoes  on the porches of his neighbors yesterday. Just set them down and walked away. “They know,” he says simply.

I’m here to sit in their living room and just be with them—one of my favorite couples. They’re celebrating 69 years of marriage this weekend, and I want to hear their story. How do you do it, make it to 69 years?

We start by reminiscing about their childhood. June grew up in Wheaton with three sisters where her father worked for Wheaton College for 50 years in both the athletic and alumni departments. She doesn’t mention it, but his name was Ed Coray; you’ll see it carved above the brick alumni gymnasium’s entrance on campus.

Pete describes how sometimes the college president would call June’s father in to say he couldn’t pay him right then but was always able to pay up by the end of the year. In those lean months, her family survived on peanut butter and jelly. They were poor but the kids didn’t know it. June describes them as happy-go-lucky, always fed and clothed. Her family loved the Lord and attended College Church from before the time she was born.

Pete’s father was sixteen when a tent meeting came to town. He told his friends, “Let’s go chase this guy out of here. A bunch of baloney.” They went to cause trouble, but the first night one of his friends went up for the altar call. Pete’s father started laughing at him, calling it a joke. The preacher saw him laughing and came right up to him, pointing a finger in his face, and prophesied that before the end of the week he would join his friend at the altar. That made the teenager laugh even harder, but the preacher was right. Pete’s dad walked down on the last day to give his life to Christ.

But when his faith was still young, Pete’s father’s parents moved north to homestead in Alberta, Canada—a barren land without churches. His faith buried, he met and married Pete’s mom. They were given land to farm but a stretch of seven years without a crop about did them in. Grasshoppers came one year and ate everything, including the bark on the trees. Droughts were common, or hail—sometimes just two weeks before harvest. Pete’s dad trapped furs all winter long and they lived off the little that brought in, as well as what he could scrape up from running a threshing crew in southern Alberta during harvest. They had seven kids in Canada, but Pete wasn’t one of them. One of his siblings died in delivery at the hands of a drunk doctor; another in infancy when the flu swept through. In 1923 they came to Chicago and there had their last three kids, the youngest of whom was Pete.

One year Pete’s mom was listening to the radio and tuned in to hear a gospel message. She knelt down and accepted the Lord right then. A week passed and she tuned into the same station when one of Pete’s brothers was at home sick.  He heard the gospel and accepted the Lord as well. Pete’s dad dug up his own faith, and soon after that their gospel work began.

His family didn’t attend church in a traditional sense but rather would go to the places where the outcasts landed and preach the gospel and sing. They visited insane asylums, penal institutions, and drunks hauled into police stations. Pete’s dad had only a third grade education and read laboriously, his finger stabbing each word in his Bible, but he had a message to preach. “Always pushing the gospel,” says Pete with pride.

I hadn’t got to the part about marriage yet, but I knew there was more. And this growing up in homes where Christ was the center would set the foundation for what was to come.

Hope. Both Pete and June were raised knowing the hope of the gospel.

Hope and Be.Longing