A lifetime of love

By Paul Binz

The Valley Catholic

PHARR   —  Albert and Dorothy Juliano will mark 72 years of marriage March 31. There’s no secret, they say, to the longevity of their seven decades of life together. As they recounted their history, he looked at her across their dining room table and declared, “There’s not been a day that I did not love you!”

The Julianos have the distinction of being the longest-married couple to participate in this year’s World Marriage Day Mass and celebration. Bishop Daniel E. Flores celebrated the special Mass Feb. 11 at the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle-National Shrine, at which dozens of couples married 50 years or more were recognized.

Before moving to the Rio Grande Valley some 30 years ago, the Julianos lived in Middletown, New York, not too far from West Point.

The two met a few years after World War II. He was a young man employed as a bank teller. She had graduated from high school at the age of 16 and was working for an optometrist. One of her duties was making the bank deposit, where she caught the eye of a certain teller. He bent the rules a bit to find out her name through the bookkeeping records upstairs and then asked her out. Their first date was a movie and then a stop for some ice cream — “half a pint … with two wooden spoons, for a quarter.”

“I didn’t think any about the fact that she was a kid!” he said.

A couple of years later, just days after she turned 18, they were married. He was 22.

While Albert was born and raised Catholic, Dorothy converted. “I married into an Italian family, and my mother-in-law was sure I was going to ‘turn Catholic,’” she said. “(Albert) did not ask me to. … He told me, ‘If you ‘turn,’ live up to it, or don’t turn.’ And I have always lived up to it, haven’t I?”

Since then, they’ve always gone to Mass on Sunday, and their son and daughter attended Catholic schools from first grade through high school.

After getting married, Albert suddenly was draft-eligible. That landed him in Korea as an Army infantryman, and he soon found himself under shellfire.

As the war raged back and forth, “we went all over Korea,” he said — both the south and the north, until one day he caught a break as he returned wet and cold from a patrol.

Someone called out his name and told him, “The colonel wants to see you,” Albert said, recalling wondering what the commanding officer might want with a buck private. To his surprise, the colonel had found out about his banking background and offered him work at the regimental PX that supplied his unit. He took the job and soon was running the PX.

Meanwhile, Dorothy was keeping things afloat on the home front. She was in charge of keeping up payments on their house with just $20 a week from her optometrist job and the $40 a month Albert was sending home from Korea. It wasn’t enough, so she took a day job at a radio station and a second job at a restaurant, waiting tables. She sometimes even mopped floors for $3 a pop and cleaned houses.

All this work “paid good money, so I was able to keep the house,” she said.

Things were not always easy in the early days. When Albert returned from Korea, he still had a job waiting for him at the bank — but now as a bookkeeper. He had to take a second job as well, working long into the night most nights at a nearby horse track.

In those days, they lived frugally, earning about $51 a week between the two of them.

“We worked … ,” he said. “… And got no charity,” she added.  “And we enjoyed each other,” he said.

The Julianos eventually had their two children, their daughter first and two years later their son. “Then I called it quits,” Dorothy said.

At one point during the 1950s, Dorothy said she almost called it quits on her marriage.

“I left home once with a baby in my arms and a little girl, and I said to my mother, ‘I want a divorce,’” she said. “And she looked at me and said, ‘You married him. Now you go home and live with him.’”

“So I did,” she said.

As time passed, their financial picture improved.

At one point, the American Bankers Association offered higher education during the summers. Albert took advantage and enrolled in part-time classes at Rutgers University to learn bank management.

“The program said, ‘Ninety percent of you will become bank presidents,’” he said. “And I did.”

He made president of his old bank in 1975, in charge of making loans, preparing budgets and selecting the other bank officers. He later held posts in professional banking organizations and garnered state and national recognition.

Albert retired in 1991. Soon after, when the couple vacationed to South Padre Island, they became Winter Texans — but not for long, settling here permanently in 1993.

They have long been active in their parish here, Our Lady of Sorrows in McAllen. Albert said he has been a lector for decades, and also is a Eucharistic minister. He also spends one hour every week at Adoration.

As for matrimony, the two are realistic about the day-to-day doings of a relationship.

“You’re going to have your ups and downs. … Get over it,” Dorothy said. “It’s not always an easy chore, but you do what you have to do.”

That’s something they’ve apparently done consistently through it all, with one other constant.

“I loved her then, and I love her now,” Albert said

“God has been very good to us,” Dorothy said.