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Couple's Lifetime Of Commitment Rewarded

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By TOM JACKSON tjackson

@tampatrib.com

Published: March 15, 2009

DADE CITY - Art Hernden was 15 and conspicuously open to suggestion. Oh, sure, like most of his peers growing up within the penumbra of Detroit astride the World War II globe, his imagination was powered by the internal combustion engine and all that could be linked to it.

But, like we said, Hernden was 15, and only partially consumed by every twitch of Tojo and Hitler as reported in the daily broadsheets, or over the living room Philco, even as he daydreamed about heroically fine-tuning the rumbling American war machine.

Which is how, although he found himself on the porch of his parents' house that afternoon in 1943, noodling with a model airplane motor and thinking, possibly, about howling, harmonizing squadrons of P-38s and B-17s, he was not beyond distraction.

As he flipped the propeller - putt-a-putt-a-putt-thup-thup-thup - he was aware of her before he saw her. Clickadee-click, clickadee-click. The crisp percussion of heels on the sidewalk cut through his reverie, announcing her approach.

Approaching 70 years later, he remembers the skirt, how it sashayed as she strolled by, inches above the concrete. "Those were the days," he says with reverence, "when, if you caught glimpse of so much as an ankle, it was something." The recollection tickles a grin from a mouth framed in a close-trimmed beard that evokes cinders and chrome.

But his eyes, blued steel, are 15 again as he conjures the thought that, having spied the elusive joint, lodged firmly in his suggestible mind: "That's the lady for me."

Destiny, Well-Served

A week past her 85th birthday, Naomi Seitzinger Hernden, a butterfly, flashes a schoolgirl's smile. "Art!"

All true, Naomi says. Her family had moved in down the street, and as the months rolled by, the boy would make up excuses to meet her as she passed, to fall into step with her, to make conversation, to inflate his romantic ambition.

More than four years older, Naomi may have dismissed Art's attention as a crush; she had a beau who became her husband, but it didn't last. "When it fell apart," Naomi says, displaying a small hand that bears Art's rings, "he was there."

Their wedding, conducted in front of a justice of the peace in Dothan, Ala., was 58 years ago last week. He was an Army private assigned to Fort Rucker; she arrived from Michigan after three days on Greyhound buses. He wore his uniform; she was a confection in a rose-hued crepe dress. And they were off.

"Looking back," Art says, "I'd say we had fun all our lives."

This, as the skeptical observer might guess, glosses over the bumps and the potholes. Rearing two children was not without its challenges, and there were times they thought they should have had their heads examined for fleeing Roseville, part of the hodgepodge of cities surrounding Detroit, for Florida in 1961.

"I mean, where the heck is Lutz?" Naomi says. "We didn't even know how to pronounce it." And you can't miss the melancholy in Art's parting memory: returning from a day of ice fishing on Lake St. Claire with pike stacked the length of a spear pole.

Enter An Angel

Still, they have been and remain joyful in the life they have chosen and in the bustling region where they've set roots - sometimes literally, as with the nature preserve they planted and nurtured for a while west of Masaryktown before moving to Zephyrhills - and the quality of that joy, like fine gemstones, is easily recognized and impossible not to appreciate.

Just the same, you don't expect absolute strangers to put that appreciation to practical effect. And that, for all the wondrous events that have rewarded their 58 years together, is what they wish described for public consumption.

A week ago Wednesday, March 4, Naomi and Art broke from a morning of errands for lunch at the International House of Pancakes restaurant on U.S. 301 south of Dade City. It was Naomi's 85th birthday, and their wedding anniversary was in a week. They were in a celebratory mood.

"We were laughing, having fun with the waitress, that sort of thing," Naomi says. She had chicken; he had sirloin tips and eggs. Finally, the check came - it was about $27, Art recalls - but it was just as quickly retrieved: "Somebody already paid it," the waitress reported.

What? How? Who? "She said it was the woman in the booth across from us," Naomi says. "Nobody had seen her in there before. Nobody knew her name. She just paid our check and left."

Art, who says he still has eyes only for Naomi, couldn't have picked their lunchtime angel out of a police lineup. "I never even looked at the woman," he says. Naomi, however, displayed uncommon alertness: She was tall, slender, blond, mid-30s. "Very attractive," Naomi says.

The Herndens, who count themselves blessed by any measure, wanted this small sliver of their life story told because, well, as Naomi says, "It was just the most amazing thing - totally unexpected and just so very nice. ... God works in mysterious ways."

On this particular Sunday in March, when so much of what binds, sustains and cheers us as a nation exhibits cracks under this scary economic downturn, the Herndens remind us that happiness shared is among the Almighty's best gifts.

Their anonymous angel of lunchtime reminds us of the joy of paying it forward.

Keyword: The Jax Files, for updates on the state of things in Tom Jackson's blog.

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