Yeah, we've been together for 50 years, and nobody could imagine that we would be together
at long, especially with her.
When I graduated high school, my fortune was that I was going to have several husbands
because I'd never be able to stay with one, and 50 years later, I'm still with you.
I don't know how I made it.
I was in the emergency room. It was an intern, and when she came down, I saw her in the ER.
I said, I have to meet that girl. That was the first time.
I had my lab coat on. I worked in the lab. I was bringing an emergency report down, and
I turned my head, and he was taking a fissure out of somebody's foot. My eyes met his eyes,
and I was engaged to be married at the time, and I had my ring on, and I took it off and
put it in my pocket immediately. That was it, because I had to go back to work and back
upstairs. We didn't say anything.
Afterwards, I saw the orderly. He was a medical student. It was an orderly. I asked him if
he knew her. I said, I would like to meet her.
And he told you I was engaged?
Yes, he was engaged, and I said, well, I still wanted to meet her.
You said it didn't matter.
It didn't matter that she was engaged. She wasn't married yet.
What did you tell them, right?
We kind of arranged it. He arranged it in a tennis, which I never played before.
And neither did I.
That's how we met.
I wore a short skirt. What did you think about that short skirt?
I don't remember.
You don't remember?
What did I say? What did I think?
I don't know.
This is for going on for 50 years.
What did I think?
I had a short tennis skirt on.
Oh, well.
Don't you remember?
Well, I guess that's our tennis outfit.
To get her attention, I used to copy poetry from a box and give it to her.
Poems? No, they weren't poems, Dad.
They were songs, Devil in the Deep Blue Sea.
He would write them the words down and give them to me.
I think I'd still have them somewhere.
I had to hide them from Grandma because I didn't want her to see them.
Then you smile with your loving eyes.
Smile that made me say, this world is nice.
I didn't know what to say or do.
So I smiled back in the best way I could do.
One of the things also is to play the piano with the nurses loud.
He used to play the Flavor the Bumblebee because I love to hear that.
And he played the girl from Ipunima.
One nurse took a liking to me, I guess, and she was mad.
They told me that she was in the piano room in the hospital with him.
And I went out and I said, you're not going to get him.
He's mine.
And that was the end of that.
I never saw her again.
Dad and I would sit in the car all the time after work and talk.
And this one time my fiance came home from college just surprised me.
And he opened the car door and dad got out and he got in and we drove off.
And we never even spoke a word about it.
I had to hide it from grandpa.
I would tell them that I was going out with Sue, my best friend from work.
And dad would go with us and we would go roller skating, ice skating, horseback riding.
We took him one time, but he eventually found out.
The policeman would come around and they knew me and they knew grandpa.
And they would call him and tell him that I was sitting in the parking lot with another man.
When he found out about the two of us, he said that I could not break the engagement with my fiance.
Now, my mother and father didn't like it that I was going out with him because he was a foreigner.
They were both afraid that he was married in the Philippines.
So that's why he always threatened to deport your father.
But he never said it to him, only to me.
I don't know if I actually believed he could do it, but he was like a dictator so he was very scary.
Your father wanted to buy a new coat because it was winter was coming and he wanted a long coat.
We said we'll go to Robert Hall. We went to his apartment and dad went to his room to change his clothes.
And I was sitting in the living room there and somebody knocked on the door.
So I opened the door and it was my father.
And I jumped out of the room and I slaved the door shut so we couldn't get to your father.
And he made me go home. He said you're not staying here and he took me home.
I think that was the first time he realized how serious we were.
When I came back to the living room, she was gone.
They didn't know what happened initially. They didn't know what happened.
She doesn't know what happened.
I guess it was January or February, my fiance came home and he said,
I think we should end this because of dad.
And I said, yeah, I think that's a good idea.
And then I was able to give him his ring back.
Then grandpa, he didn't want us to elope. He did not want us to run away.
So one day he got the two of us and he sat us down and he said,
what are you going to do? You're not going to run away and get married.
And we said, OK, what are we going to do?
And we said, are you going to get married?
And we both said, yeah, I guess so.
But I wasn't really ready to get married.
I had to go to a residency in another state in the Europe.
Then I was thinking, I really love her.
If I go, that would be the end.
So I said, well, maybe we should get married.
We were married in Mount Carmel, a church in Asbury Park.
I didn't tell my parents about the marriage because it was quick.
No, don't lie.
Your mother didn't want you to marry an American.
I don't think so.
Yes, you told me because of the television.
In the movies.
My mother's impression of Americans is from the movies that she sees.
And they're always getting divorced and all that.
So I didn't want to tell her that because I know she might not like me to get married to an American.
My sister told him about us being married.
Our reception was at the backyard of your mom's house.
My father had said, if you're going to get married, we're going to plan this wedding.
So we planned the wedding in the backyard.
We had a piece of linoleum for the dance floor and we rented seats.
And in the basement, we had all the food lined up.
We invited about a hundred people that came, relatives and friends.
You got drunk.
Yeah, shall I tell them that part?
Your father got drunk and fell asleep. I couldn't wake him up.
He was red like a lobster.
Then he had to go to work the next morning and who knocks on the door but my mother with her neighbor.
When we got married, we knew he was going back because we bought examining tables and all electrical things were for the Philippines, not for the United States.
And we had them in storage for when he finished his residency.
And he told me we would be paying pigs and chickens.
Right?
Well, in the province.
In the province, right.
Well, that's where we would have been.
I wasn't sure where to do that when we were staying in the city.
I had several boyfriends before and I never really felt like I felt about him.
If I wanted him, I had to go to the Philippines and that's, what are you going to do?
I had never been to the Philippines so I had no idea what it would be like.
I started thinking about whether or still be able to survive the way your life there.
That's what changed my mind.
And we got married and we applied for him to be a United States citizen.
And then afterwards we changed the tables to American electric when we decided we were going to stay.
It is the first Negro, white, miscegenation case to go to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia.
There have been a handful of others, every single one of them.
Involving a person of what might be called yellow extractor or Malaysian or Filipino and white persons.
So to say that the problem itself is insignificant in Virginia is not at all true.
Now, Virginia stands here today and in this loving case for the first time tries to find a justification other than white racial supremacy for the existence of its statute.
Music
And there was a lot of time.
And we heard that.
It's the same when we get married.
65.
I didn't know.
Yeah, I had no idea about that.
But it was against the law.
Yeah, I knew it was against the law but I thought it was over.
Everywhere we went, people would stare at us.
They'd walk backwards and look at us and I'd say,
why don't you take a picture to last longer?
Do you want us to pose for a picture so you can remember us?
You used to say all that stuff, didn't I?
Yeah.
I used to. And this one time we were in the grocery store and we were walking and this woman was walking backwards and walked into the toothpaste display and fell over and all the toothpaste fell on her.
And dad used to walk ahead of me all the time, at least two or three steps because he didn't want people to think I was with him.
I was scared. I was scared then.
I was afraid that somebody, some crazy person would hurt us being of different color.
It used to make me mad and I'd walk the other way.
Then he turned around and I was gone.
Well, you know, it wasn't common. You don't see people that are different races together.
People still to this day stare at us when we're together.
But I think we're so used to it. I don't see it much anyway.
Yeah, I don't even think about it anymore.
Before I was very conscious about it. I was afraid.
I was 26 when I first came here. It was 19 when I met her working in the hospital.
It's been a long 50 years.
It came on take.
Would you do it again?
Yes.
Even with all the bad times?
And the fighting.
Fighting on my side, not on your side.
I think we had a pretty good life.
A good time. That's the way it is supposed to be.
Marriage is supposed to be that's what it is.
That's what it is.
