BURKETTSVILLE — July will be a big month for anniversaries in the Fullenkamp family.
Barb and Pat Fullenkamp, of Minster, will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary July 2. Barb’s parents, Florence and Cletus Hemmelgarn, of Burkettsville, will celebrate their 70th anniversary, July 20.
The two couples, and Barb’s sister, Ann Schwieterman, of Sebastian, gathered around the Hemmelgarn dining table recently to reminisce and talk about how rare it is that two such anniversaries happen in the same month.
Florence was 21 and Cletus, 23, when they married in 1946. They had begun to date three years earlier after they met through Cletus’s cousin. Their first date was at a dance at Kemper’s Grove Dance Hall. Cletus proposed on Christmas Eve 1943 but left to join the Navy in May 1944. He saw service during World War II in the Pacific as a body guard for his ship’s skipper, achieving the rank of petty officer first class.
“It was 45 days before I got a letter from him and then I got 45 letters all at once,” Florence remembered.
A few months after he returned from the service, he and Florence were married in the St. Denis Catholic Church in Versailles, Florence’s hometown. They settled in Burkettsville, Cletus’s hometown, and Barb, the first of their 12 children, was born there.
Then the Hemmelgarns moved to New Weston, where they had seven boys. After they returned to Burkettsville, they had four more girls. All the girls were born in Burkettsville. All the boys were born in New Weston.
“Grandma Hemmelgarn said it was because of the water,” Florence laughed.
Barb and Pat’s first date was at the wedding of a friend. They became high school sweethearts in the St. Henry High School class of 1965. The couple dated for a year and a half and married when Barb was 19 and Pat, 18. Their wedding was in the St. Bernard Catholic Church in Burketsville in 1966.
Both brides, mother and daughter, had two attendants. Cletus had two groomsmen. Pat had four. Both brides wore formal gowns and waist-length veils.
The 1946 ceremony was on a hot day, but not as hot as the 1966 wedding.
“It was over 100 degrees,” Pat said. And he remembers that well. “I fainted,” he said. After he and Barb made their vows and took communion, “he passed out,” Barb laughed.
“Well, I’d had my tonsils taken out the week before,” Pat said by way of explanation.
Florence and Cletus’s reception was at Florence’s parents’ home in Versailles.
“We put up a big tent in the back yard,” Florence said. Then the couple went dancing in the dance hall near Eldora Speedway in New Weston.
Barb and Pat’s reception was at Bar E in Rossburg. They honeymooned at the Columbus Zoo and Niagara Falls and settled in Minster, where they raised three daughters. They have five grandchildren.
Cletus farmed all his life. He also managed a fertilizer business, Kaiser Chemical, and Florence worked as his bookkeeper.
“She was a good bookkeeper,” Cletus said. They have 19 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and “two on the way,” Florence said.
The Fullenkamps have five grandchildren. Barb and Pat retired five years ago from Post Printing. Barb had worked in the bindery and Pat handled estimating and purchasing. They travel a lot and have visited all 50 states, Australia and France.
“Mom and Dad traveled a lot, too,” Schwieterman noted. The Hemmelgarns enjoy playing cards and they attend lots of family parties. Schwieterman said every birthday and holiday are celebrated with their parents.
Each couple’s anniversary will be marked with a Mass in their honor.
They had a good time remembering important lessons they had learned from their parents:
“Dad told me never to lie,” Cletus said. Florence’s mom taught her how to cook. She, in turn, taught Barb how to be a good wife.
“I had good role models in my parents,” Barb said.
For Pat, it was responsibility. His dad told him, “Whatever you do, you’re responsible for it.”
When it comes to advice by the Hemmelgarns to the Fullenkamps about how the younger couple might make it to their own 70th anniversary, Cletus was very succinct.
“Behave,” he said, with a wink at his wife.
