Elderly couple’s love story 65 years long

by Samantha House

The bride and groom stand side by side before a minister, hands entwined. His hand blankets her tiny hand entirely, keeping it warm. She smiles radiantly, stealing occasional glances at her groom. He stands straight and proud, never wavering from his bride’s side.

Elvis Presley croons “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in the background to set the mood for their nuptials. From the looks on Mavis Walczyk and Ralph Black’s face, it’s easy to see the two are in love.

But Walczyk and Black’s romance is no fledgling flame. Their love story is 65 years in the making.

Black said his and Walczyk’s first encounter stretches back to when she was 8 and he was 11. She was simply his friend’s kid sister then, a friendly figure in a house he loved being in.

“We grew up together,” Black, now 86, explained. “I really grew up in their home as much as in my own.”

Walczyk, née Barber, belongs to one of Weedsport’s most well-known families. Ernie Barber, Walczyk’s father, opened Barber Welding with his brother in the village more than half a century ago. Over 58 years later, the family welding company still calls Weedsport home.

Black looked up to Walczyk’s father and spent a great deal of his childhood in the Barber home. He said he and Walczyk often passed central New York’s long winters twirling around frozen ponds.

“I think we skated our life away,” he remembers with a smile.

Then World War II ravaged the world, inspiring a 17-year-old Black to use his skills as a pilot to defend his country. After being officially enlisted in the Air Force at the age of 18, Black flew planes until the war’s conclusion.

When he returned home, the childhood acquaintances became more than friends. Walczyk said she and Black “went together” for five years. Black even bought his sweetheart a ring.

However, it seemed their union, for a time, was not to be.

As a young nursing student living in Auburn, Walczyk’s heart was captured by the suave Louis Walczyk.
“He swept Mavis off her feet because Ralph was slow on the trigger,” Kathleen Hultz, Walczyk’s eldest daughter, said.

And so the former sweethearts married other people. Walczyk had nine children, and Black had four.
“They had a nice marriage, and so did I,” Black said.

When Walczyk was widowed in 2008, Black broke their decades of silence by being the first person to send a sympathy card. Four months after Louis Walczyk’s death, Black, already a widower, asked his former sweetheart on a date.

“They’re back together, and they’re happy as clams,” Hultz said, adding that she and her siblings are happy the two reunited.

On Nov. 11, Walczyk’s 83 birthday, the couple embarked on a journey they once intended to take more than 50 years ago. In a delicate wedding dress she purchased from the Salvation Army, shortened and died blue, Walczyk holds a bouqet of orange, yellow and red roses as she faces her soon-to-be husband.

Surrounded  by their families in Walczyk’s son Steve’s kitchen, the bride and her groom promise to love each other and slide wedding rings onto eachother’s fingers. With two tears running down his cheeks and a brilliant smile on her face, Black holds Walczyk’s smiling face in his hands and kisses her, again and again.

“Kiss her again, dad,” shouts Black’s daughter.

And, clasping his wife’s hand, he does.