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Dallas Morning News
Sunday May 1 2011
60 years of marriage started with a blind date
Nicky and George Glazener's 60-year marriage started with a blind date. She wasn’t impressed, but he sure was. Luckily, she gave him a second chance.
By DARLA ATLAS
Special Contributor
Published 29 April 2011 06:24 PM
Sometimes it pays to give a person a second chance.
Just ask Nicky Glazener. Back in 1950, she agreed to go out on a blind date with a Texan named George, whose job in the oil and gas exploration business had relocated him to her hometown in Kansa
“Oh, I didn’t like him,” Nicky, now 78, recalls. “After that first date or two I thought, ‘I don’t think so.’”
George, meanwhile, had an entirely different take on the matter.
“I thought she was the cutest little thing!” he says with a laugh.
Nicky can’t remember exactly why she didn’t care for him: “It was just one of those feelings you get,” she says. “I’d dated just a few other people, not very many. Then after we dated another time or two, it changed.”
After they’d gone out for about six months, George — who liked to think of himself as “footloose and fancy-free” — realized that he was slipping into a serious relationship.
“I had no intentions whatsoever of getting married,” he says.
Just as George was taking a step back, Nicky was falling in love.
“He didn’t show up for a couple of weeks,” she remembers. “My mother said, ‘Donna June’ — that’s my full name — ‘Donna June, you just quit crying and give him a phone call.’ That’s what I did, and we got back together for lunch. He didn’t try to leave again.”
“Forever,” George adds.
The two were married on July 29, 1951, the day after Nicky’s 19th birthday. Thus began the couple’s life of adventure and travel together. During their first year of marriage, George’s job took them from Oklahoma to Kansas to Colorado to New Mexico to Utah and back to Oklahoma.
“After we bought our mobile home, we moved around 24 times in 27 months,” Nicky says.
“Can you imagine someone like that leaving home with a guy like me, to work on oil field crews?” George says with a chuckle. “There has not been anybody else like that. No one could stay married to me but her.”
As they continued to relocate from town to town, the couple expanded their family with three sons: Steve, Stan and Jeff, now 58, 57 and 51. By 1969, George had been promoted to manager of new technology for Sun Oil Co.’s Seismic Computer Center in Dallas. He retired in 1980 as manager of geophysics.
The two then started their own business in oil and gas consulting. George would often take their clients fly fishing, while Nicky stayed home to do the paperwork. “His buddy in Oklahoma was a guide, so he’d leave me home with the secretarial duties,” she says. “I thought, ‘You know what? This doesn’t sound quite right.’” They then developed a love of fly fishing together, a hobby they continue today.
The couple, who settled down in Plano 41 years ago, spend a lot of time with their children and five grandkids. But the most recent decade hasn’t been easy.
In the past seven years, George has battled both bladder cancer and colon cancer. After he beat the first one, “a month later we found out he had another cancer,” Nicky says. “Last year was not a good year for us. We had chemo and radiation and two major surgeries.”
George describes his wife as “my constant nurse. She saved my life.
“A positive attitude and low tolerance for self-pity goes a long way in defeating life-threatening cancers,” adds George, who last month was told he’s cancer-free again. “Especially if you have a beautiful nurse for a caregiver.”
The two laugh easily and often together. Both feel blessed that Nicky gave him a second chance all those years ago.
“She’s spoiled me so bad,” George says. “Now and then she fusses at me because I’m spoiled, but I keep reminding her that it’s her fault.”
But he also spoils her in certain ways. Back when their first son was a baby, a tradition was born.
“He’d go out on the crew really early and come home afterward,” Nicky says. “Before he’d go rock the baby, he’d bring me coffee in bed.” To this day, George gets up each morning to make his special delivery. “All of our married life, she gets her coffee in bed every morning,” he says. “It calms all the troubled waters.”
As she looks back on her 60-year marriage, “it’s definitely a God thing,” Nicky says. “One thing that has kept our marriage together is that if we had a little argument, I’d say, ‘OK, you’re right, I’m wrong, I love you.’”
As for George, he can’t contain his enthusiasm for the curly haired woman who became his bride.
“She’s my best friend and the best person that ever lived,” he says. As he starts to describe himself as “a very difficult person,” his wife begs to differ. Still, he adds, “She has stars in her crown.”
Photos in article:
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secret ...
! What kind of fish is that? Top-secret!
