Area couple shares 71 years of memories

COEUR d'ALENE - In 1936, Vernon Sylte's family packed up a team of cattle and left South Dakota and its dust bowl for good.

"Blew us out," as Vernon put it. "So we loaded up the cattle."

And headed West, to Rathdrum, which was a town of 200 people at the time, with one volunteer sheriff. The transplanted family borrowed money from the local bank to buy a plot of land, the first down payment of which was 120 cut cords of wood.

A payment they almost missed, which would have chopped history all to pieces.

"We very nearly lost the farm," said Vernon, 92.

But they didn't, and around that time Alice - now 91 - noticed the new boy at high school.

She remembers the herd of cattle and one sheep the family brought showing up in town one day, but she remembers seeing Vernon at his new school with his brother.

"I'll take this one and you take the other one," she remembers telling her girlfriend, meaning she got Vernon. "We laughed. But I ended up marrying him."

Seventy-one years later, the couple is still together. Their anniversary is Oct. 3. Parents of two, great-grandparents of four, the couple survived a World War, ranch fire, 40 hunting seasons and plenty of basketball games together.

They even built 20 Rathdrum homes as a two-person team.

That was back in the 1950s, and the couple - he was a school teacher and principal and she a one-time nurse - built homes during summer vacations as a way to supplement their income, which was meager.

"She'd get mad and throw the hammer down and leave," Vernon said. "Two hours later, she'd come back."

"I did that pretty regular," Alice said, but added she always returned and at the end of the day. "I hammered more nails than anyone in town."

And the investment worked; the family - namesakes for the locally well-known Sylte Ranch - made a little money. Once, they were sued in the home-building business, but the judge in the case was a former pupil of Vernon's, around the time when they had 44 kids to a classroom and drinking water was a bucket of water in the hallway "with a dipping ladle in it."

"We won the case," Alice said.

Married in Coeur d'Alene in 1941, Vernon served in the Navy's medical field during the Pacific Theater. His boot camp was at Farragut, so he saw his young bride most nights, but once he shipped he didn't come home until 1945, the war's end.

The secret to longevity, other than the war, is sticking together.

From home building to elk and deer hunting (they hung up their rifles around the age of 80) everything they did, they did side-by-side. Vernon, a former North Idaho College basketball player, even coached Alice's recreational girls' team when they were in their 40s. They still love hoops, and watch Gonzaga and NIC games religiously.

They lived a clean life, free of drinking and smoking and full of activity. It was gadget-free, too, and it's an ease in one's life not to covet the latest devices, gizmos or material products.

"I tell you," Alice said. "I wouldn't trade anything we did or had for anything you have now."