Anniversary gift catches up with parents 40 years later

By Barbara Soderlin, Journal staff | Sunday, July 13, 2008

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Betty Richards didn't have to wait for her 75th "diamond" anniversary to get a big rock.

The gift came early, at Saturday's 50th anniversary open house for Betty and her husband, Thad. And it weighed perhaps 200 pounds.

The party room at the Canyon Lake Senior Center was full of friends and family, mingling and drinking punch, when their son Kirk, who came in from California for the occasion, asked everyone to take a seat.

"This'll probably be the oddest gift anyone ever received for their wedding anniversary," he said. In front of him was a large object on a cart, covered by a gold tablecloth, and Kirk and his sister, Kim Morsching of Rapid City, each grabbed a corner and pulled.

Betty gasped, clapped her hands together, then held them to her cheeks. "Oh, my God," she said. She and Thad hugged their children, and Thad went up to the gift, tried to shake it, and said, "You don't get concrete like this anymore."

For their guests who couldn't see from their seats, Kirk explained. In the 40-year-old hunk of driveway, frozen in time, were the names of the Richards' three children, youngest to oldest, Kay, Kirk, Kim, written in childish handwriting by little fingers.

Kirk told the story:

The concrete came from the driveway of the first home the Richardses owned, in Bellevue, Neb., in the 1960s when Thad was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha.

The couple from Kansas with three young children were young themselves. They'd sneaked into Oklahoma to get married on July 5, 1958, because Betty was a nursing student, and nursing students weren't allowed to be married. She wore her wedding band taped under another ring for three months before she graduated.

In Bellevue, the family didn't have much money, but they had the sense of humor they still share today and the beginnings of lifelong friendships forged over card games and barbecues with other Air Force families.

They moved on from that home, and others, as Thad's Air Force career took them around the country and the world, in each new place unpacking their things, and their memories, and starting fresh, as a family together.

The Air Force took the family to Ellsworth, and they settled here after Thad retired, with an expanded "Air Force Family" to camp with and celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and holidays.

When it came time to plan the 50th anniversary party, Kirk thought back to that slab of concrete, and he wrote a letter.

He addressed it to the occupants of the old house in Bellevue, and dropped it in the mail, not knowing what would happen. The homeowner got in touch.

"She called back right away and said, 'I can't believe how many times I've looked at it and wondered, who are these people, and what are they doing?'"

The homeowner, about the age of the Richards children, was also from an Air Force family, one that had been stationed all the same places the Richardses had over the years.

She was willing to give up the piece of driveway, and Kirk called a contractor about removing it, and told the story about the anniversary again.

"He almost started crying."

The only question was, how to get the concrete home? Another family connection helped them out.

Kim Morsching's son, Kevin, an SDSU baseball player, died last summer of a brain injury in a skateboarding accident, and the family established scholarships in his memory. An Omaha catcher who received a scholarship happened to be coming this way on a road trip and agreed to make the delivery.

Kim and Kirk kept the concrete a secret for months, delighted to have something unique to give their parents to celebrate their long commitment to each other, and to their family and friends.

When it was over, they couldn't wait until their mother would have a chance to make the call to Virginia to tell their sister Kay, whose husband is stationed at Langley Air Force Base, about the big surprise, the one that made Betty shake her head and say, "Oh, that is too cool," before wondering aloud, "How are we going to get that home?"