Couple still finds lots of love after 63 years of Valentine’s Days
By David Blanchette
Jim and Pat Robson first met at the old David Prince Junior High School in Jacksonville, but that first meeting definitely did not foretell of their future years together.
Jim: “I sat behind her in home room and I guess I pestered her quite a bit.”
Pat: “I didn’t like him then.”
Now, after nearly 63 years or marriage, Jim and Pat can look back with fondness on how they finally came to like each other, their marriage at the tender age of 18, raising a family while balancing Jim’s military service and a law enforcement career, and what keeps them in love after more than six decades.
Following their inauspicious meeting in junior high school, Pat and Jim dated off and on while attending Jacksonville High School. But things took a more steady turn during their senior year.
Jim: “The last year in school I decided to give it up. So then she started chasing me.”
Pat: “I think God actually talked to me and said ‘you know what, you’d better take this one, he’s a good guy.’ So I changed my mind. It was just of like a light bulb came on. I decided he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.”
Pat and Jim were going steady when they graduated from high school in 1960. Pat’s parents wanted her to attend college, so she enrolled at Western Illinois University in Macomb. That started a semester-long, long-distance romance.
Pat: “He came up and got me every weekend and brought me home. When I went back to my dormitory in Macomb at the end of the weekend, I’d go in and have my big cry. Finally at Christmas break I told mom and dad, ‘I’ve got to come back, I can’t keep doing this.’”
Pat enrolled at Flamingo School of Beauty in Jacksonville to train as a beautician. Jim went to work for a local plumber. By the end of 1960 Jim developed appendicitis and had to have surgery, but when he recovered his job was no longer there. Faced with medical bills from his surgery, Jim decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.
While Jim was in basic training, he and Pat decided they wanted to get married.
Jim: “My mom didn’t think we were old enough, but she knew that we were going to get married one way or the other. I was 18 years old, enlisted in the Army, and my mother had to sign the marriage certificate for me so we could get married. You had to be 21 years old for males and 18 for females.”
Even though they had talked about marriage, the actual proposal surprised Pat.
Pat: “My mother and I had gone to the drive-in. When I got home my father was sitting in the living room and I said ‘what have you been doing?’ And he said ‘oh, I’ve been talking to Jim.’ And I said ‘oh dad, don’t talk like that, you know how I feel, it just makes me cry.’ About that time Jim came walking in from the hallway and he had a ring for me, he pulled it out of the desk drawer that mom and dad had and he gave it to me.”
The proposal occurred on a Friday. Pat bought a wedding dress from the Emporium in downtown Jacksonville the next day. The couple lined up their attendants and were married the following week, Wednesday, June 28, 1961.
The Robsons didn’t have much of a honeymoon because Jim had to immediately report to Fort Gordon, Georgia for two months of training before being shipped off to West Germany. It was the height of the Cold War, something Jim saw first-hand when he was deployed with an intelligence unit to West Berlin for two years.
Jim: “We took a train into Berlin and they stopped before we left West Germany, and Russian soldiers came through the train. It was during the building of the Berlin Wall. They were blocking off the East Germans from West Germany. It could have been bad, because at one time they told us that if the East Germans and Russians came over the wall into West Berlin, after 24 hours they would not claim that they knew me.”
Pat: “I knew he was in Berlin. I was living with my parents. At that time the spouses couldn’t join their husbands, so I stayed home. And nine months almost to the date after we were married, I gave birth to our first baby, Kevin. He was nine months old before Jim got to see him when he came home for Christmas in 1962.”
Jim returned to the United States for good in September 1963 and went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he mustered out of the Army in April 1964. He returned to his young family in Jacksonville and worked first as a carpenter’s assistant and then as a driver for ILMO Products Company.
That’s when Jim responded to a newspaper ad and was hired as a patrolman in 1965 with the Jacksonville Police Department, where he worked for three years before joining the Illinois State Police. Jim liked the work, but he knew it took a toll on Pat.
Jim: “You have to have a wife who is very, very understanding to be in law enforcement. A lot of times you’re never home. When I was with the State Police there were college riots going on and we’d get called to Southern Illinois University and be down there two to three weeks at a time, then over to Champaign where we’d be sleeping in the gymnasium. And our wives were at home the whole time with the family. It takes a certain woman to be able to do that for you.”
Jim’s 10-year career with the State Police ended after he went four years without a pay increase. Jim took a position with Wareco that paid him several thousand dollars more than he was making as a State Trooper. By that time he and Pat had four children and quite a few hospital bills with their fourth child. Jim stayed with Wareco for 17 years.
During this time, the 52-year-old Jim decided he wanted to do something audacious.
Jim: “I came home from work one night and I looked at Pat and said ‘I’m going to run for sheriff.’ And she said ‘yeah, sure you are.’ Then she looked at me and said, ‘you’re serious, aren’t you?’”
Pat: “It scared me.”
Jim: “I went out and told the chairman for the Republican Party at the time that I was going to run for sheriff. He more or less told me that I didn’t have a chance and that nobody knew me in the county. I told him before it was over everybody would know me.”
Jim faced three opponents in the primary election, which he won, and Jim went on to defeat long-time incumbent Henry Jackson, Jr. to be elected the new Morgan County Sheriff.
Jim: “At first when I walked into the office after being sworn in, I sat down at the desk and I told everybody, ‘give me a minute.’ I sat down at the desk and I thought, ‘what in the world have you gotten yourself into?’”
Pat: “I worried all the time. At that time you could have a scanner and I could hear what was going on as far as accidents and so forth. There was one Christmas Eve he came home with salve all over his face, a radiator had blown up in his face and they wanted him to stay at the hospital. He told them no way, he was going home.”
The couple also remembered an accident one night where Jim’s squad car was rammed when he had stopped to assist a motorist with a flat tire.
Jim: “The driver ran into the back end of my squad car. He pushed it into the car we were working on and totaled both cars. It was just a good thing I was out of the car at the time, because the car caught fire and completely burned up.”
Pat: “All I heard on the scanner was fire engines were rolling out, there was a squad car involved. There were a lot of times where I would stay at home with the kids in bed and wonder what was going on.”
Jim enjoyed his 12 years as sheriff, but decided he should retire at the end of his third term, which was just shy of his 65th birthday. Since then he and Pat have enjoyed traveling and visiting with their children. Their oldest son Kevin was born in 1962; daughter Danette Scott was born in 1964; son Bruce was born in 1967 and was killed in a 2002 boating accident, and son Glenn was born in 1972.
The Robsons were asked about the secret to having a long, happy marriage like theirs that has lasted through 63 years and counting.
Pat: “Being truthful, always talking to each other, holding hands, saying ‘I love you’ every day. Saying ‘I love you’ before you go to bed every night with a good-night hug, getting up in the morning with a morning hug.”
Jim: “Don’t ever go to bed mad at each other. Right, honey?”
