Affairs of the Heart : 75 Years of Laughter and Compromise

This is Vida Chenault’s favorite story in the whole world:

It’s about a man and a woman who came into their prime shortly after the turn of the century, and the seeds of a marriage that has persevered for 75 years, longer than some people’s entire lives.

And the curious thing about these two--the thing that’s still remarkable lo these many years later--is that they connected, well, by not connecting.

“When he came to the school, the girls all flocked to the office, and I avoided the office and he paid attention to me,” she says and laughs.

The story is, of course, about Vida’s own faraway youth as a Spanish teacher and her enduring romance with that dashing instructor of industrial arts, Dwight Chenault. They have reached the stately age of 102 together against the odds, both man-made and heaven-sent.

On vaulting the human hurdles, credit simple determination. “I think a time or two she would have been very willing to divorce me, but I refused absolutely to have a divorce,” Dwight says.

On braving the celestial, credit simple living. “I always took good care of my health,” Dwight says. “I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink. I didn’t carouse around at night. What else could I do? I was a good little boy.”

These days, Dwight’s health is stauncher than that of his delicate wife, who is drifting in and out of sleep in her room at the Windsor Manor Convalescent Lodge in Glendale.

She is wrapped in Chinese silk embroidered with gold thread and adorned with a moonstone lace pin once owned by her mother. Her hair has been prodded into spun-sugar curls by Windsor Manor’s hairstylist, in honor of one of Dwight’s weekly visits. Dwight comes with their daughter, Rose, 73, who cares for Dwight in the Eagle Rock home he’s lived in for 41 years.

“I quip the cops never found out where I lived so I didn’t have to move,” Dwight says.

Vida is asked what Dwight was like in 1912, when they met at a high school in El Paso, Tex.

“Much like he is now,” she says, her fingers curling around her husband’s. She turns to her daughter. “Don’t you think so, Rose?”

“Well, his appearance has changed somewhat,” Rose muses. “He was blond.”

“I lived to be 102,” Dwight says and laughs.

Vida beams: “He was always awfully good-lookin’.”

He was, in fact, a toddler with long blond curls, which held limited charm for his Kansas parents. “When he was getting ready to go to school, his father said, ‘That’s the end of that.’ And he cut them off, and his mother cried copious tears and hung the curls in a bottle,” Rose says.

Vida was born Vida Redic on a farm south of Indianapolis. As young adults, Dwight and Vida each migrated to El Paso shortly before World War I, Vida to teach Spanish grammar and literature to students of Mexican heritage and Dwight to earn the then-princely sum of $125 a month teaching wood and metalworking. They met in 1915.

Dwight: “There was a boardinghouse close to the high school and Vida and I both had rooms. And Vida and I were both high school teachers so they put us together at the table.”

Vida: “And when my hand was (bandaged) he cut up my meat and I never let him out of my sight after that.”

Dwight is asked how he knew Vida was the woman he wanted to marry. He laughs.

“I haven’t the slightest idea. How did I know? I don’t think I married her. She married me.”

Vida is asked how she knew. She laughs.

“How does anybody know? I fell in love with him.”

When Dwight was drafted into the Army, Vida seized the moment.

Dwight: “She says, ‘Now we’ve got to get married.’ I says, ‘We haven’t done a thing that makes it necessary to get married.’ ”

Vida’s argument turned out to be more compelling, however, and they married on Sept. 24, 1917, in Vida’s brother’s home in El Paso.

Rose: “She was going to be married one night after school was out and her sister-in-law said, ‘Nothing doing. You take the day off.’ And she took her to town and got her a wedding dress, shoes, gloves, the whole bit. It wasn’t a long dress. During the war, you didn’t indulge in such things, but it was an especially nice dress.”

Dwight was sent to various Army posts around Texas, while Vida taught in El Paso. And when he returned in 1918, they moved into a house on Brown Street, where Rose and her younger sister, Betty Mary, now 72, were born.

Much to Vida’s dismay.

Rose: “Mother cried when she found we were born in Texas because she was from Indiana.”

Still, Vida wanted more children and one of the couple’s near breaking points erupted over her delicacy.

Dwight: “She was a small woman. She weighed 98 pounds, and Betty had come and I said, ‘No way we can possibly have any more so we didn’t.’ ”

They ended up with a large family anyway. Their children bore the Chenaults 11 grandchildren, who’ve produced 18 great-grandchildren--and yet another generation nearly made its debut this year.

Rose: “My oldest granddaughter thought she wanted to get married the 8th of February this last year, but she wasn’t over college. Finally at Christmastime she saw the light.

“She was doing her wedding invitations and one of her great aunts said, ‘What if you change your mind?’ And it set her to thinking, so she changed her mind. He wanted to start a family right away and you can’t go to school and have a family. So the family got together on the 8th of February to celebrate the fact that she didn’t get married.”

Dwight: “They were all invited and ready to come in for the wedding, so they came in for the no-wedding.”

Over the years, the Chenaults lived in Phoenix, where Dwight was certified as an architect, and eventually in Los Angeles, because Betty Mary and her family were there. And over the years, the Chenaults have slowly but surely been outliving everyone they know. Even their daughter is in the unsettling position of outliving her relatives.

Rose: “I don’t approve of my younger cousins dying.”

Dwight: “If people want to go, goodby. I can’t hold them.”

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Chenaults’ 50th anniversary seems so distant now that no one can even remember how they celebrated it. Their 75th will be a September fete planned by Vida’s rest home.

What you can say is that a sense of humor didn’t hurt anybody, and neither did the fine art of giving in.

Dwight: “I didn’t try to rule the family with an iron hand. There were a few things that had to be, and that’s the way it had to be, but mostly we just simply got along with each other.”

Would you call that romance? That depends. Dwight is asked what he loves most about his wife.

“Her absence,” he says with a hoot. “That’s ornery, isn’t it?”

Rose: “I would say he respects her but that’s as far as it goes.”

Dwight: “That’s in most of the vows now--’till death do us part’--and some people say, ‘Well, that’s all right, I’ll go kill her.’ ”

And just as Dwight is reminding you that 75 years is, in fact, a very, very long time, you realize, too, that only the strong survive.

Dwight: “I don’t like to fight with anyone. I wouldn’t want to cross you up and have you leave here feeling angry at me because of things I had done or said. I’d rather you thought I was a damn fool.”

So you know what Dwight will do when Vida wakes up and searches for his hand.

“Sit down and just stay a little while, can’t you?” she says. “Can’t you sit down and stay a while?”

And he does.