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closeEndless love
Puyallup couple celebrates diamond anniversary
Avani Nadkarni
Charles and Evelyn Pierson’s marriage has outlasted a lot of things. The couple, who have spent their entire 75 years of married life in Puyallup, have stuck by each other through the Great Depression, 13 presidents, two children, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
They have watched friends endure divorces. They’ve survived parents, longtime friends, siblings and a son-in-law. They have come through a serious car accident and helped each other slowly rehabilitate.
Still, they insist, there is no “secret.”
The Piersons now reside at Merrill Gardens, a retirement facility in downtown Puyallup. They have their group of friends there, people like Hazel Wood, who’s known the couple for 70 years, but they often hole up in their second-story apartment.
Ninety-eight year-old Charles, or “Charlie,” Pierson attended Puyallup High School, where he was a popular student who played football and was voted student body president by his peers. He also had a love for impromptu entertaining — Charlie Pierson and a few of his classmates would open the dictionary, choose a word and create a skit out of it, which they would perform at weekly assemblies.
“I loved the stage,” he said.
He graduated in 1928 and went on to Washington State University but returned to Puyallup after a couple of years to help his ailing father with the family business, Pierson’s Candy Store on River Road, a Puyallup staple at the time. A quick learner, Charlie Pierson held a day job with Hunt’s Foods and came in a few nights a week and weekends to whip up his father’s special candy recipe. He would make four or five 17-pound batches of peanut brittle, the store’s big seller, on Saturdays.
“It’s the best peanut brittle you’ve ever eaten,” Evie Pierson said proudly.
Around that time he met Evelyn Andersen, a strong-minded, staunchly Democratic Tacoma native who had just graduated from Lincoln High School. They married when she was 20 and he was 23.
“I said to myself I was not going to get married until I was 20,” Evie Pierson said. “I saw my friends getting married early and they didn’t seem happy. So I made a promise to myself and kept it.”
The couple wed in a Tacoma church — they’ve since forgotten the name — on May 30, 1934, and celebrated by staying at Charlie Pierson’s brother’s Hood Canal home for a few days. Then they went back to their real life — Charlie Pierson to his jobs at Hunt’s Foods and his family’s candy store and his wife to her off and on part-time jobs at J.C. Penney and Maloney’s Flowers. During their marriage, Charlie Pierson even had a stint as a firefighter with the Puyallup Fire Department.
The couple says they gave each other the silent treatment only once and quickly got over it.
“She’s Norwegian,” Charlie Pierson said by way of explanation for her stubbornness.
“He thinks that makes a difference,” Evie Pierson said, laughing.
The couple has had a few scares in their seven-and-a-half decades together. In the 1960s, the couple was driving along Interstate 5 one night when a driver who was trying to outrun the sheriff broadsided them. Charlie Pierson remembers their car spinning across several lanes of traffic and hitting a telephone pole. He was unconscious for a few minutes but when he came to, he managed to remember to turn the engine off. He had seen enough car fires during his time as a fireman. The couple were both OK, although they still suffer achy backs due to the collision.
Then, 10 years ago, they were at a friend’s home in Lakewood when Charlie Pierson said he began to “feel funny.” His wife rushed him to the hospital, where his heart stopped beating and medics had to revive him.
“I died and came back better,” Charlie Pierson likes to say.
He now stays healthy by doing 300 repetitions a day with two 10-pound dumbbells he keeps in their living room.
The two usually pass the time at Merrill Gardens together. Charlie Pierson likes to play Bingo and is an avid reader — their daughter, Joanne Haynes, keeps his book stash supplied when she makes trips from her Mill Creek home. He’s even written several candy recipe books for his grandchildren so they can keep the tradition alive. Evie Pierson likes to watch the national news and makes weekly trips to the retirement facility’s beautician to get her hair done.
“She still looks at him with those eyes and giggles,” Merrill Gardens General Manager Mary Susan Gibson said. “It’s such a wonderful family.”
Gibson and Haynes planned a big party filled with family and friends for the couple on their anniversary day. Evie Pierson, her hair newly set, had the time of her life.
“I just can’t imagine being married for so long,” said Ryan Britt, the couple’s “favorite waiter” at Merrill Gardens. “They’re just phenomenal.”