What's the secret to love that lasts? Tracy couple married 64 years may have the answer
TRACY -- What's the secret to a love that lasts?
One couple living at Brookdale Tracy, after 64 years of marriage, might just have the answer.
"Where did the time go?" asked Linda La Presle, flipping through her wedding photo album from 1960.
She and her husband Roger La Presle are both 84 years old and say their devotion to one another has only grown stronger in the decades that have passed.
"We are still very much in love and very happy," Linda said.
Despite how long they've been together, it didn't take them long at all to decide they wanted to spend their lives in each other's arms.
"We dated for three weeks and got engaged. We only knew each other for three weeks. I didn't need more time, and she didn't either. It's like, what took you so long?" Roger said with a laugh.
"I wasn't surprised at all," Linda said of the proposal. "It just clicked. It was very comfortable."
Roger added that they "told some friends that we were engaged to get married. They looked at us and said, 'You're kidding. Are you serious? You don't know her that well.' I said, 'I know all I need to know.'"
Before there were wedding bells and the promise of forever, there was a chance encounter in 1959.
Linda was on a two-week trip to visit her brother who was teaching at a university in Honolulu, Hawaii. She was staying at the YMCA, where she offered her help as a volunteer when a local church group set up shop there to serve free meals to the Navy sailors who were stationed at Pearl Harbor.
Roger, a seaman, was one of the many young men who came for the free meal and hospitality.
For both Roger and Linda, their first impressions could be described as love at first sight.
"He had a great smile and a nice shirt. So, I thought, what more do you need?" Linda said with a laugh.
"This young lady walked in and I leaned over to my buddy, another Navy man, and said, 'I'm going to marry that girl someday.' I had no idea who she was or where she came from, but all of a sudden, I'm going to marry her. I just knew it."
As it turns out, the pair was from the same town in Pasadena and went to rival high schools. However, they had never met until Linda went on a dream vacation and found her dream man.
Linda extended her stay in Honolulu past the two-week vacation to stay there for three months. She got a job as a travel agent and enjoyed the beauty of a new romance in a tropical paradise.
"Sometimes our dates would start at ten at night and go to one in the morning when I got off duty," Roger said.
"I made my mind up years ago to be happy with Roger and he's never let me down," Linda said.
From that choice came forever. The two were married in 1960 in Pasadena after Roger was discharged from the Navy after two years, having returned from ship duty that took him all the way to Japan and back.
While he was away, Linda and Roger, newly engaged, wrote passionate letters to each other detailing what they wanted out of life and love.
"Because after 60-something years, you have a whole different set of thoughts on what is important, but we started out talking about what was important. So when we got married, we had a good foundation to go from there," Roger said.
They spent most of their life after his time in the Navy raising a family in Southern California, between Pasadena and Fullerton. Linda and Roger had three children and now have ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
The whole family now lives in the Tracy area.
"Everyone wants to know, what's the secret to a love that lasts?" reporter Ashley Sharp asked.
"We just talk to each other, you know?" Linda said.
"You both put 100% of yourself into your marriage. This idea of 50/50 doesn't work. It's 100% going into your marriage. And, you talk," Roger said. "You can't over-communicate."
Communication, they say, is the key to finding and keeping true love – and also, a few key questions.
"What can I do to help you? Where do you want to go? How do we get there? Can we do it together?" Roger said.
By answering those questions with honesty and devotion, love only gets sweeter with time.
"She's the only one I want and I would define that as love," Roger said.
