By Sentinel Staff
Jacqueline Clem and Donald Neros were married one day after Valentine’s Day, on Feb. 15, 1959, because the bride wanted to be married on a Sunday.
But it might as well have been a Valentine’s Day wedding – they’re celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary today and still hold hands, a daughter said.
Jackie was 19, Don 21, and they exchanged vows in the Evangelical Free Church in Enderlin, North Dakota. They had met when her family moved to Enderlin in 1953 and Don became best friends with Jackie’s brother, Sonny.
“Mom said she fell in love with Dad when she was 13,” one of their daughters wrote at the time of Jackie and Don’s golden wedding anniversary celebration. When her family moved away for a short time the next year, Jackie and Don became pen pals, “supposedly because her brother didn’t like to write letters.”
Don had to borrow $50 to get married, which Jackie later told her children came as a shock because she thought he had $100 in savings.
After they were married, they lived in Minot, N.D., where he was stationed with the U.S. Air Force. Their first child, Jonie, was born that December.
In May 1961, Don and a close friend, David Anderson, drove the Alcan highway to Alaska while Jackie stayed behind to await the birth of daughter Lisa.
The family settled in Anchorage, living first in an old homesteader’s cabin where bears roamed the yard and snow blew in through the walls. They bought their first home in 1963, in the Sand Lake area, and added daughter O’Dina (their “earthquake” baby) in August 1964.
Jackie missed her family, and in 1967 they returned to the lower 48, living in Enderlin then Aurora, Ill., where their fourth child, son Christopher, was born.
With jobs hard to come by and Don missing Alaska, the family returned to Anchorage, and in 1971 they moved into a home Don built, on Huffman Road.
Don retired from the Air National Guard in 1976 with the rank of chief master sergeant and joined the FAA in the Flight Service department. He was stationed in King Salmon for four years, and then to Sitka, in 1980. He retired from the FAA in 1997.
Jackie has a love for all things related to children. She was a full-time Mom to her family, baby-sat other children, and has tended her grandchildren.
Don and Jackie are active members of the United Methodist Church.
Family memories include many trips up and down the Alcan to visit family (always with some kind of car trouble); watching sports of every kind; the kids riding horses with Dad and wearing beautiful clothes made by Mom (through high school); and having the parents at every event the children were involved in.
“We grew up secure in the warmth of our parents’ love for one another and for each of us,” the children wrote at the golden wedding anniversary. “Could any child be given a greater gift?”
When someone pointed out that Jackie is as lovely on her 60th anniversary as she was at her wedding, one of the daughters said “she stays beautiful because she never sits still – none of us have her energy. We’re the luckiest kids to have them for parents.’’
In addition to their four children and “terrific” sons- and daughter-in law – Jonie and Scott Calhoun of Sitka, Lisa and Steve Coleman of Anchorage, O’Dina Baeza of Spring Hill, Florida, and Chris and Jenevieve Neros of Bellingham, Washington – Don and Jackie have 12 grandchildren: Adam, Ryne, Janae, Stefan, Rebecca, Bryn, Travan, Taryn, Harley, Sofia, D’Lancy and D’Arby.
They also have seven great-grandchildren: Nikolas, Caleb, Junior, Yareli, Ysabella, Houston Berlad and Avery Frank.
