John and Joann Pike remember their first impressions of each other clearly, even though it was over 65 years ago. “I’m gonna marry him,” Joann recalled recently. “He’s handsome and a basketball player.
All the girls looked at him. But guess what, I looked at him and he looked at me. He was smart.
” Joann was right. She married John. The couple, now both 77, celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on June 25.
They married on that date in 1964, but had known each other for longer. Joann and John, who is one week younger than his wife, started dating at age 13 when they were both in eighth grade and living in Fresno, Calif. Joann said he was the boy next door.
They rode the bus together and talked on the phone for hours. They could almost see each other through the windows of the two pastures between their houses. John said he was always looking for Joann whether it was next door through the windows pantry that overlooked her house or in the school.
They didn’t have classes together, maybe just one, and John said he couldn’t get enough of his future wife’s beauty even then. Joann’s father had a farm of 13,000 chickens every six months, raised them to fryers, and then sold them and started all over. John worked on her father’s farm because they needed help.
During lunch breaks, the young couple would go for 19-cent burgers with their earnings. The first date Joann and John recall was in the next town over when they watched “The Birds,” a 1963 horror-thr.