By Jodi Hausen,Staff Writer

FARMINGTON – It’s a mystery how some people live to 90 or more. Even more mystifying is how a couple can stay together for seven decades.

Stanley and Dorothy Reynolds may just have the answers to both.

“You just have a lot of understanding,” 88-year-old Dorothy Reynolds said.

The couple celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in May surrounded by an estimated 60 friends and family members at Edgewood Rehabilitation and Living Center, where they both live now.

“I guess we just got along good, that’s all,” said Stanley, matter-of-factly.

“We never got mad at the same time,” said Dorothy. “If I got disgusted with him, he’d laugh at me, and vice versa,” she added with a chuckle.

Sitting at a table in a large dining room, the two rifled through old photographs and reminisced with well-wishers, many of whom were seeing themselves in the images of bygone days.

Before moving to Edgewood, the couple lived in Strong, where they raised four children.

Both Stanley and Dorothy, also known as Dot, worked at Forster’s mill in Strong. They met when Dorothy’s brother, who worked with Stanley, brought him home for the weekend.

On their dates, they went to movies “a lot” and to barn dances, they said. And after dating for about a year, they figured that two could live more cheaply than one, Dorothy said.

“So we got married,” she said.

“I thought she was a nice-looking girl,” said Stanley with a shrug of his shoulders.

“When I got married, things commenced to look better for me. I’ve been happy all those years. We’ve both had a good disposition,” he added.

Teamwork could be what kept the Reynolds together.

Living in a rented house in Strong with four children during the Great Depression, they had no hot water, no toilet and no car. But all four children were bathed daily, said Dorothy.

In assembly line fashion, she’d tend to the kettles of hot water on the wood stove and scrub the children in the tub while Stan wiped them dry and sang to them.

When Stan was laid off from his mill job, “we lived on as little as we could, there were no extras,” Dorothy said. She made a lot of the kids’ clothes.

When it came to spending what little they had, they decided together how to prioritize their purchases.

“We coped OK, I guess. Most everybody was in the same boat,” Dorothy said.

Now the couple counts 10 grandchildren, a dozen great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, they think.

We’re losing track of them, they said. Even their son, Michael Reynolds, and his wife, Theone, were having difficulty counting his parents’ descendants.

Stanley, a World War II veteran, said his wife’s emergency appendectomy saved him from having to serve overseas. His unit shipped out only days after Dorothy’s appendicitis, he said. She was home with four children at the time.

One the happiest times Stanley could recall was coming home from the service, he said.

“I was glad to be home,” he said.

“He was a homesick little boy,” said his wife. “He said he missed the kids, he didn’t include me at the time,” she said with a laugh.

Stanley celebrated his 90th birthday the same day as the couple’s 70th anniversary.

“He figured if he got married on his birthday, he wouldn’t forget his anniversary,” chided their son, Michael, sitting in his father’s room at the center recently.

So how has he lived so long?

“I wouldn’t dare tell you,” said Stanley, with a mischievous grin.

Now both live at Edgewood in separate rooms. They’d like to be together but are waiting for a room to become available.

“It’s like having a date,” Dorothy said. “I kiss him good night and go home.”

“Boy, what a party,” said Stanley of the recent anniversary shindig.

“It was a wonderful life,” he said.