BIRD ISLAND, MINN. - Judy Schindler had always wanted to marry a farm boy.
But when the farm boy finally showed up at her home for a blind date, the city girl was less than impressed.
“He had spent the afternoon at a baseball game and had a few to drink,” she said.
Still, his name was Bob — her favorite name for a boy — and the date wasn’t terrible. They went to see “No Time for Sergeants,” the 1958 Andy Griffith comedy. He laughed at her jokes. By the second date, she’d begun to fall for him, and on the seventh date, he proposed. She told him he was crazy. They married a year later and last summer celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary.
On the surface, Judy and Bob seemed like polar opposites. He had grown up cleaning chicken pens and milking cows in Chaska — when it was rural — while she grew up in northeast Minneapolis surrounded by small shops and lots of cars and people. He always had chores to do, while she played the piano and spent time with friends.
But they shared a sensibility forged by the Great Depression, the war years and 1950s optimism. She had always been jealous of her city friends who got to visit relatives' farms in the country. Farm life seemed fun. When she was 20, an old family friend asked if she wanted to meet a farm boy and she said yes.
Bob, 22 when they met, had bought his first dairy farm near his parents’ place. After they got engaged, her future mother-in-law offered to raise the chickens for their wedding lunch, on one condition: Judy had to help clean them. To the astonishment of her mother, Judy, who wouldn’t touch raw poultry at home, agreed. She loved and trusted Bob and figured she could do anything he and his family could do. She also didn’t want to let him down. So together with Bob, one of his sisters, and his parents, they killed and plucked 50 chickens two days before the wedding, storing them in milk cans with ice until the big day.
They got married in the morning on a hot June day, ate chicken dinner with their families and friends, and then carried chicken dinners to two special men who had not attended the wedding: the Eitel brothers, Adolph and William, who had saved Bob’s father from losing the farm during the Depression.