Staying Together
Two couples married 60 years apiece still live two blocks from each other in Rockwood. Here, they remember life back in the day and ruminate on what it means and what it takes to spend more than a half-century with one person.
Carole Archer / The Gresham Outlook
Morrie and Marie Portin reminisce about the old days in their Rockwood home, which is filled with family photos and portraits. Morrie supported his family of five children with his photography businesses, Gateway Portrait Studio and Race Track Photo Service.
Rockwood was bare as a baby’s bottom in the 1950s when the first young families came looking for a place to raise their broods of children.
Roy and Catherine Fall and four of their children (the fifth came after they moved to Rockwood) arrived in 1955 wanting a corner lot. They got a basement thrown in for free because they bought the “show” house on the corner.
“Twelve thousand dollars, $89 a month, and they promised the payment would never go over $100,” remembers Roy, who drove a truck for Albina Fuel.
“And we worried about how we would ever make the payments,” Catherine says.
*
Two blocks west and two years later, Morrie and Marie Portin found a house that would hold their five children, five bedrooms, counting two in the basement.
A photographer, Morrie owned Gateway Portrait Studio and parked a yellow Hillman van in front. He worked two jobs to support his family, and she sold Avon.
A new “Leave It To Beaver” community began to rise around them, a Kienow’s grocery on the corner where a berry field used to be. A Rexall drug and an ice cream place named John and Mary’s where the kids took 5 or 10 cents and bought a treat. A barbershop on the corner.
*
A half-century later both couples, still with the same spouses, are in the same houses. The old neighbors turned up in the same edition of The Outlook with side-by-side announcements of their with 60th anniversary parties.
“We were married three days apart in 1947, lived all these years in the same neighborhood, and our kids went to school together,” marvels Roy Fall. So he went down to his basement lair, similar to the den where Morrie Portin hangs out in his house, to clip and laminate a copy of the Portins’ anniversary story. Then he hiked down the street and gave it to them.
*
Longevity. Staying put. How do you live 60 years with the same person?
“Grin and bear it,” says Morrie Portin. “Give and take,” adds his tiny wife, Marie.
“You overlook a lot of things,” he says, and she turns in her chair to interrupt him with a snort. Recovering quickly, he suavely adds, “You treat your spouse like she’s real important, which she is.”
Nice save, Morrie.
In considering the same question, Roy Fall says, “You put up with a lot.”
Catherine adds dryly: “We couldn’t afford to split up.”
“And the kids keep you together a lot,” he says.
But did they ever consider divorce? “Never, ever,” he breathes.
*
Like most couples their age, the women were primarily responsible for child rearing while their husbands worked to bring home paychecks. Morrie Portin held two jobs, the photograph studio, which often took him away on weekends, and in the 1960s he became the photo finish photographer at the Multnomah Kennel Club. He eventually purchased and still owns Race Track Photo Service.
Roy Fall worked 35 years, mostly on the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, delivering fuel. His children were asleep when he got off work. He was asleep when they left for school. By the time they returned he was leaving for work.
“The raising of the children was hers, she was the disciplinarian,” Roy says, with a reverent nod at his wife. They differed on that. She was willing to whack the kid who needed it. He talked to them.
“I couldn’t raise one today at all,” she says.
Marie Portin, while raising two girls and three boys, remembered “being alone so much” when her husband was working two jobs. Enough to make you want to sit up and scream, she admits, but she never did.
That was a rough time, they conceded, but parting ways? Never considered it.
“It seems now that it was all good times,” she says, of the days that her kids could count on coming home to hot cinnamon rolls on the counter.
*
“Those were the days,” smiles Roy Fall. “Everybody in the neighborhood was a veteran, young, just starting to raise families. We’d have parties in each other’s yards in the summer.”
Days were filled with Boy Scouts, Little League. Catherine shooing the kids away from her favorite tree in the backyard so it would have a chance to grow. Marie Portin took her children to a berry field in the neighborhood to pick. They used the proceeds to buy a picnic table.
Rockwood Road (now southeast 182nd Avenue) was a two-lane country road. Catherine Fall and the kids would sit on the front porch and just for fun, count cars going by.
“You’d be lucky if five came by in an hour,” she muses, listening to the constant traffic outside their home. “Now it’s a superhighway. It used to be gravel.”
*
The Portins “moved on up” for a time, to a big house in Gresham — 3,240 square feet. Three of their children married while they were there, but after the kids left they got to rattling around. When the purchaser of their former home defaulted on the contract, they returned to Rockwood.
“I had really missed all my friends and neighbors,” Marie says.
Both the Falls and the Portins can count a scattering of original neighbors around them. The Falls still have the original kitchen of their show home, the cornice around the ceiling cut in scallops. The green laminate counters.
The traffic is awful, the Falls say. And Marie Portin acknowledges that there was a drug house on her street for a time. But the Portins’ presence, and that of other stalwart residents, maintains the neighborhood.
*
Among the best times, both couples agree, were the years after retirement. The Portins surprised themselves by unexpectedly buying a motor home. “The woman selling it told us to sit down at a table (in the motorhome) and she’d bring us a couple cups of coffee so we could see what it would be like,” smiles Marie Portin. They bought the vehicle and enjoyed getaways and lake camping.
“It was the first time we’d ever seen Crater Lake,” Morrie said.
After 21 years of working nights, Roy Fall retired “so we could travel more.” They returned to New Jersey where they had met to visit her family. On their 50th wedding anniversary they went to Hawaii and liked it so much they went back the next year.
u
The Falls lost a son to a drug overdose. Their other son, a Marine, survived three tours in Vietnam. Catherine Fall is still recovering from a surgery that scared them both.
They have a routine. She watches TV upstairs. He watches downstairs. When he wants her to see something, he thumps on a pipe, she picks up the phone and they talk. She collects stuffed animals. He collects statues of Liberty and frets about the squirrels snitching all the walnuts on his backyard tree.
They have lived in 1,100 square feet for 52 years, but once there were seven of them with one bath. How did they do it?
“I have no idea,” he says.
It would be harder these days, Roy Fall says, because “there is so much more to want.”