Couple married 70 years dies just hours apart

NEW HYDE PARK, N.Y. — A Long Island couple married for 70 years has died just hours apart at their assisted living residence.

The children of Ruth and William Bauer tell Newsday that their 92-year-old mother died around 7 a.m. Monday in Glen Cove. The family says 97-year-old William passed away 11 hours later. 

“They were two halves of a whole,” their daughter, Marie Bauer of Asheville, North Carolina, told Newsday. “They supported each other and didn’t like to be apart.”  

The couple’s younger son, Tom Bauer, said he believed his father was “staying around” to help his mother, who was suffering from memory loss and deteriorating eyesight in the last decade of her life, according to Newsday.

Both husband and wife were committed to their communities. She was a school librarian and volunteered as an AARP tax aide. He coached little league and, in 2011, was honored by St. Francis Hospital for volunteering there for 29 years, the newspaper reported. 

The causes of their deaths weren’t provided.

The New York City natives and longtime New Hyde Park residents met in the early 1940s at a bank where they both worked. They married in 1946 after William Bauer returned from serving with the Navy in the Pacific during World War II.

A funeral service for the couple is scheduled Friday morning at a New Hyde Park church. Their survivors include their three children and five grandchildren.