Thelma and Joe McQueen celebrate 73 years of married life
Joe and Thelma McQueen talk about love and life in the front room of their Ogden home. The McQueens celebrated their 73rd wedding anniversary on June 10, 2017.
Joe and Thelma McQueen talk about love and life in the front room of their Ogden home. The McQueens celebrated their 73rd wedding anniversary on June 10, 2017.
Joe McQueen picked up Thelma — the woman with whom he just celebrated 73 years of marriage — in a bar.
Literally. Picked her up.
The two had known each other from school there in their small town of Ardmore, Oklahoma. A saxophonist, Joe had a regular gig at a bar in town.
“I was playing in that place in Ardmore,” he recalls. “I’d get off the bandstand — because I was the bandleader, I could do that — and dance with the women.”
One of those women was Thelma.
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On that particular night, a torrential rain had hit southern Oklahoma, flooding the parking lot out in front of the bar.
“Water that deep,” Joe says, holding his hand about a foot up the side of the easy chair he occupies in the front room of the couple’s Ogden home.
Joe just happened to have hip-waders out in his vehicle, so he put them on. And then he actually picked up Thelma and her sister-in-law — lifted them off the ground — and carried them through the floodwaters to his vehicle to drive them home.
It was 1943. Joe and Thelma have been an item ever since.
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“There were plenty of gals in that place that I could have taken home,” Joe says.
But Thelma was special.
“I could see, even in the dance hall, she was a quiet person, not running her mouth all the time,” he says. “And when she was young? She was one of the best-looking women around.”
For her part, Thelma says Joe was a kind man.
“He treated me nice,” she said. “He changed a lot.”
Changed?
Thelma doesn’t much care for talking. (“I think I took after my dad,” Thelma explains quietly. “He could sit all day and not say a word.”) Joe picks up the narrative.
“I was just kinda mean,” he admits. “I got in trouble, and beat a guy up pretty bad.”
Joe’s mother had died when he was 14, but his grandmother was right there to pick up the slack. She told him: “Son, trouble is easy to get into and hard to get out of. That temper of yours is going to get you into trouble.”
Joe knew his grandmother to be a wise woman. He took her at her word. So in his early 20s, Joe says he just up and “changed.”
Joe and Thelma dated for about a year after the flood. So, how did he propose?
“I asked her to marry me and she said, ‘Alright,’ ” he recalls. “So I said ‘I’ll go ask you mother if I can marry you.’ And her mother thought I must have been a nice guy, because she said I could.”
The local minister married them on a Saturday night, in Joe’s grandmother’s home.
“It was June 10, 1944,” Joe says. “Four days after Normandy (D-Day). I remember Normandy like it was yesterday.”
Joe moved out to California to play in a band, and eventually sent for Thelma. On Dec. 7, 1945, the McQueens were traveling with a band when they stopped in Ogden. While here, another member of the band stole the group’s money and left town. Joe and Thelma stayed.
Joe sets the record straight on news stories about how the well-known saxophonist came to live in Ogden.
“They kept saying we were stranded in Ogden,” Joe says. “We weren’t stranded — we could’ve left any day we wanted to. We had some money.”
Indeed, Joe had recently been given $100, plus which he’d just hit a slot machine in Reno for $380. That was a lot of money back in the mid-1940s.
Rather, Joe says he and Thelma chose to stay in Ogden.
Fast-forward 72 years. Joe just turned 98 last month, and Thelma hit 93 in January. No children, but plenty of nieces and nephews that Thelma helped raise. And they’ve lived in the same Ogden home since Feb. 15, 1973, when Joe bought it from a man for $5,000 — with all the furniture still in it.
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So then, Joe and Thelma had something special planned for their 73rd wedding anniversary, right?
“Absolutely nothing,” Joe says.
They’d intended to go visit a niece in Texas, but Joe developed a bladder infection and they had to stay home. And with the medication doctors have him on, Joe has to stay out of the sunlight.
As a result, Saturday’s anniversary was to be a quiet day at home.
“I don’t care about eating out,” Thelma says.
Nor is the pair big on giving each other anniversary gifts these days, either.
“I’ve given her everything I could think of to give her over the years,” Joe says with a smile.
A combined 146 years of marriage and 191 years of living between the two of them. So, what’s their secret?
“The good Lord has just been taking care of us,” Joe says. “I tell people all the time: ‘Married people, when they do it right, live longer.’ “
Obviously, Joe and Thelma McQueen are doing it right.
Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/MarkSaal.