On Saturday, Vernon and May Mauritsen, former longtime Bigfork residents, celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary with family and friends at Bethany Lutheran Church in Bigfork.

Vern, 93, and May, 92, hope for a big turnout at the festivities from 2 to 4 p.m. featuring singing and violin performances by their large extended family including their four children, eight grandchildren and six great grandchildren.

“All our friends including the people here (Buffalo Hill Terrace) are invited,” May said.

The couple spent 40 years in the Bigfork area before moving to the assisted living facility this spring. They lived in a house Vern built just below the white cross on the cliff overlooking Flathead Lake.

While Vern still misses their home and his large workshop, May said she enjoys the lifestyle at Buffalo Hill Terrace.

“It’s a beautiful facility and the people are wonderful,” she said.

Their love story began when Vern met May Bellerud in a history class at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. May recalled being impressed by his performance as a blind musician in a college play.

“He played the violin,” she said.

Vern courted her for four years while he majored in music with the goal of becoming a band director. When asked what attracted him to May, he joked that she was female.

“She was a very nice person and we had many interests in common,” he said.

Vern didn’t pop the question while they were both attending classes. It happened after she left Moorhead, to his surprise, to attend Miss Woods’ Kindergarten and Primary Training School in Minneapolis for two years.

“He  came back from Europe and found I wasn’t at Concordia,” she said. “Pretty soon I heard from him. He invited me back to homecoming at Concordia. That’s when we got engaged.”

May said they spent a lot of time arguing back and forth on the phone about setting a wedding date. At the time, she was working at her father’s mercantile in her home town of Nekoma, N.D.

 Vern said the big element was whether or not he would be sent overseas to war.

“I had joined the National Guard when I was only 15,” he said. “The clouds of war were gathering.”

When they learned his poor eyesight would keep him stateside, they chose the date of Dec. 21, 1941, just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. May recalled the delicious wedding brunch that her mother prepared before their noon ceremony for a large gathering of relatives.

“We had fried chicken and lefse,” she said.

Their marriage adventure began in Browning in 1942 where Vern had a job as a band leader of a school with mainly Blackfeet Indians. He found the youth tremendously talented in music and still remembers one young man riding a horse to school with a well-worn horn strapped to his saddle.

Another fun memory was taking the band to the Great Falls county fair.

“We stayed on the fairgrounds in tepees,” he said with a laugh. “It was an Indian encampment.”

One of his students, Forrest Gerard who played first clarinet, became Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs in 1977 under President Jimmy Carter.

May taught in Browning at the Star School. She instructed the first through fourth grades at the school, which has long since been closed.

“We took a picture there last year,” she said. “ I was standing by the boarded-up school.”

 Their first two children, Carol and Peter, were born in Browning before Vern accepted a new position in Sunburst as teacher/band director. Their other children Jean and Mark were born there.

Vern said the community had about 1,000 people yet he had a band of 60 that marched away with the honor band award when they were invited to perform at the highly-competitive Portland Rose Festival.

Also in Sunburst, the couple got involved in the construction industry and eventually built a successful lumber yard that offered a new system developed by the University of Illnois, building with prefabricated panels. They sold the business in 1967 when Vern was offered a position at Concordia College.

“I became director of a rather unique program teaching foreign languages to children 8 to 17,”  Vern said. “That program has grown to the extent that they have roughly 6,000 children studying 15 languages in the summer.”

Four years later, the couple returned to Montana to the Flathead Valley where Vern first devoted himself to building their house on the bluff below the white cross off Montana 82. While he built, May worked at Swan River Elementary School.

“I taught second and third grade for 13 years,” she said.

Vern later became superintendent of parks and recreation for the county. Both Vern and May retired in the 1980s, when they began traveling to Denmark and Norway, the homelands of their ancestors, as well as around the United States.

The two have savored the success of their children and grandchildren, who have achievements too numerous to list. Many people ask about how they managed to stay together and have such a successful family and marriage.

May said she thinks their four-year courtship helped because they got to know each other so well before marriage. They developed communication skills during those years that benefited their relationship.

“He had a lot of drive and creative ideas,” she said. “He always talked them over with me. We figured out how to get the money to do something.”

Whether it was building a business, building a new house or just paying a bill, Vern and May discussed it together. Vern then applied his own formula for a happy marriage.

“I just did what she told me,” he said with a laugh.

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com .