The Newlywed Game – Part 3The Stamford Advocate
December 19, 2006

By Vesna Jaksic

NORWALK – Robert Pettus and Anne Mish Pettus were widows in their 80s when they met. He was mourning the loss of his wife of 58 years. She had just begun to cope with being single after her husband of 57 years died.

Once they got to know one another, they realized that if anyone had enough experience to make another marriage work, it was them.

“He was married for 58 years, and I was married for 57 years,” she said. “That gives us a total of 115 years of experience, right?”

In June, Pettus, 86, married Mish Pettus, who was 81 at the time, surprising some of their friends and relatives. With a combined age of 167, the couple is the oldest among more than 4,600 whose marriage licenses were filed in Stamford over the last five years.

“Whenever we meet someone and we tell them we just got married, you should see the expression on their face,” she said.

One of his friends called him an “old rascal” when he found out the two octogenarians were newlyweds. A girlfriend of hers said, “You go, girl!”

Neither thought much about remarrying after they lost their spouses, but that changed once they got to know each other, they said.

“We often refer to it as a small miracle,” she said. “Miracles don’t happen very often. We knew we shouldn’t waste it.”

The Pettuses said they got married because they are old-fashioned and believe in the tradition and meaning of marriage. But because of their ages, some parts of the ceremony were hardly traditional.

The groom’s best man was his oldest son. The bride’s matron of honor was her daughter. The ringbearers were the bride’s grandsons. During the wedding ceremony at St. John’s church in Darien, the bride and groom sat in chairs on the altar.

The couple met in February 2005 during “Tea and Empathy,” a Sunday afternoon event for a bereavement support group at the Center for Hope in Darien. Five years had passed since his wife, Flo, had died of natural causes. Her husband, John, had died of lung cancer a couple of months earlier.

“I kept asking, ‘Do you begin to feel better with time?’ ” she said of her initial conversations with Pettus. “He had answers for me and encouraged me. . . . It was like I just met a man who gave me a new life.”

The couple soon started dating.

Pettus, an Indiana native who retired from the construction business, started driving from his Rowayton home to pick up Mish Pettus at her Stamford home and take her to the movies or dinner. She joked that because he would not hold her hand at the movies, she was afraid he was gay. He said he was just trying to be respectful of her recent loss. Their grief counselors warned against jumping into relationships within a year of losing a spouse.

“They call it a rebound,” said Mish Pettus, who retired after working as a credit representative at several banks.

He found her unusual, partly because of her unusual hair — she has bangs and wears curls on top of her head — and partly because of a speech condition that makes her voice tremble. But it was her personality that caught his attention.

“I thought she was much different than some of the other women I met,” he said. “She has a lot of spunk. Most women my age are afraid of doing anything.”

He proposed on Valentine’s Day with a ring made of red string because she once told him she wouldn’t care if he gave her a piece of string as long as he was at the other end of it. She could not help but recall that he was born on Jan. 1, the day her first husband died.

“It’s like one door closed and the other one opened,” she said. “We knew there could be issues because of our age. But our attitude was, if something happened to him I would take care of him and vice versa.”

Mish Pettus’ daughter said she was surprised to learn her mother would remarry but respected her decision.

“I’m really proud of them because those are the values that I was brought up with,” said Laurie Manos, 49, a stay-at-home mother in Lincoln, Mass., whose children were ringbearers at the wedding. “When they came here before they got married, I wouldn’t let them stay together. Talk about role reversal — they had to stay in separate rooms.”

Mish Pettus waited until after she got married to move into Pettus’ Rowayton house, which he built as a 28-year-old married father of three.

“A lot of people live together – they call it shacking up,” said Mish Pettus, a New Jersey native who spent most of her life in Stamford and recently turned 82. “That was not going to be our lifestyle.”

“She was a very proper lady,” he said. “It was frustrating for me, but she was a proper lady.”

Between them, they have seven grown children and six grandchildren. They enjoy going out to dinner and movies and plan to travel to Europe next fall. Once a week, they take ballroom dancing lessons in Stamford and practice rumba, the tango, the cha-cha and the swing.

Dancing is one way they embrace passions from their previous marriages; he used to dance in cotillions with his first wife. On their wedding day, Pettus made his son read a poem about their first marriages.

“We were left by ourselves alone in the house, hoping, with luck, we might find a new spouse,” read a part of the poem. “Grateful for things that we had in the past, we knew not to let opportunity pass. The wonderful lives that we had until then gave us the courage to try once again.”