Three siblings mark 50 years of marriage

WATERFORD – When Chloe McIntire Colby and her husband, Gene, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary Sunday, they were playing a bit of catch-up with Chloe’s brother and sister.

Chloe’s sister, Sally McIntire Richard, celebrated 50 years of marriage to her husband, Pierre, last year. And in 2000, Chloe’s brother Justin McIntire had his golden wedding anniversary with his wife, Louise Litchfield McIntire.

Just how is it that all three offspring have managed to reach 50 years of togetherness with their respective spouses?

“Respect,” said Sally.

“Patience,” said Chloe.

“We were actively taught how to recognize good people. We were taught to treat not good people well,” but just not marry them, said Sally.

All three couples, their children and grandchildren, gathered for Chloe and Gene’s celebration at the family’s compound of camps on Papoose Pond. One is the McIntire hunting lodge, built just before 1900 when the McIntire farming family bought woodlots on the pond.

Sally credits their parents, Glenn and Marguerite McIntire, with instilling in the three siblings the values necessary to sustain a lifelong marriage.

“It was because of their example. Their strong, spiritual and moral standards were lovingly explained to us and demonstrated to us,” she said.

Their mother, Marguerite Pearman McIntire, met Glenn when she came up from Massachusetts to serve as assistant pastor at the Norway Universalist Church.

After they married, they moved around in the Oxford Hills area until the family moved to Brunswick, where the elder McIntire had landed a job as burser at Bowdoin College.

Chloe’s two sons and two daughters put on the anniversary party at the Colby’s camp on Papoose Pond. Even though the family is far-flung the rest of the year, in summer the three siblings, their spouses, children and grandchildren gather at three camps that sit side-by-side on the pond.

Their kids have all told the three long-lasting couples how impressed they are with them, and what an example they have set for them, Sally said.

“I think that we’re each as much or more in love with the person we married now than we were when we met them,” Sally said.

Although Chloe is active in the Waterford Historical Society, she and Gene make their home the rest of the year in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Richards live in Vienna, Va., outside of Washington.

Justin and Louise divide their time between Florida in winter, and Harpswell in summer, where Justin is an active lobsterman, Sally said.


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