Still traveling together
SUGARCREEK TWP, Armstrong County—Travel has always been a big part of the marriage of Stanley and Gloria Ann Gruver. The longtime Butler County residents moved around the country for 10 years when Stanley was in the Navy.
After his discharge, the Gruvers moved to Karns City where he went to work for the-then Pennsylvania Refining Co. and she was a housewife as they raised their five children.
With a limited budget, the Gruvers took their family camping. Travel and visiting various states became an important part of their lives.
“We did a lot of camping. I still have a camper in Cook Forest and a Park Model trailer at an RV park in Barstow, Fla.,” he said.
Later with the children out of the house, the Gruvers began snow-birding every winter at their home in Florida, leaving after Christmas and returning in May.
Their youngest daughter, Jodi Delany Rosnack said, “We knew how much our parents loved to travel, so for their 50th wedding anniversary we sent them on a weeklong Caribbean cruise and for their 60th wedding anniversary we sent them to Gatlinburg Tennessee. They loved Dollywood.”
But Stanley’s travels are now confined to the four-mile drive he makes every day between his home in Karns City and the Whispering Fields home where Gloria has been living since her Alzheimer’s disease has progressed.
For their 65th wedding anniversary, there weren’t any trips or cruises. Just a gathering of their children and a catered dinner at the care home Saturday to mark their wedding on March 6, 1958.
Stanley said, “Anything more would be too much for her. If there’s too many people, she gets too worked up, and I have too many grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
And even that simple celebration almost didn’t come to pass, said the Gruvers’ son, Jeff.
“It was touch-and-go for awhile. We thought she had a stroke, and then he did have a stroke,” he said. Last year, Gloria was unresponsive and had to be taken to Butler Memorial Hospital. It turned out she was having an adverse reaction to her longtime blood pressure medication. It affected her differently, her family believes, when her weight dropped from 220 pounds to 121 pounds without the dosage being altered.
And Stanley himself suffered a stroke that left him hospitalized for three days and permanently blind in one eye.
He said he was at his winter home in Bartow, Fla. for a week’s visit when he woke up Feb. 21 to a different life.
“I got up in the morning. I wasn’t seeing right,” he said. “I couldn’t see nothing in my left eye.”
A three-day stint in a Florida hospital determined he suffered a stroke but not what caused it.
“I’m lucky that’s all it affected. I could be a vegetable,” Stanley said.
“It’s been a challenge getting to 65,” he said of the latest wedding anniversary.
He said the stroke hasn’t kept him from visiting Gloria on his return.
“Some days, I’m her dad, some days I’m Stanley her husband. Some days she doesn’t know who I am but she says ‘You’re somebody I love,’” he said.
It’s just the latest chapter in their long-lived romance.
“My friend was dating her cousin, and he needed someone to take her cousin to the Dayton Fair,” Stanley said. “I was 18 and we’ve been together ever since.”
He plans to continue to visit his wife every day.
“I still see the girl I married,” said Stanley. “We’ve had a good life. We’ve done a lot of traveling, seen a lot of things.”
“We’ve had 65 good years, really good years,” he said.
