Local man recalls 73 years of devotion
CENTRE COUNTY — Some love stories don’t begin with fireworks or sweeping gestures. Some begin quietly, in familiar hallways, with small moments that only matter later when you realize they mattered all along.
Clovis Morrisson and his wife, Marilyn, grew up in the same place, just six months apart in age, close enough to share a piano teacher but far enough to move through different classes and friend groups. For years they were, as Clovis puts it, “just another nice kid” to each other. It wasn’t until his senior year and her junior year of high school that two small moments turned into something neither of them could have predicted.
As vice president of the student body, Clovis was asked to help judge a debate tournament. Marilyn was the lead debater for their high school, already winning regional competitions. During one speech, she paused, searching for the right word before blurting out “democratedness?” — a made-up word delivered with what Clovis remembers as a “pained and questioning look.” The room laughed. Clovis didn’t. He found her appealing in that moment, flustered and human in front of everyone.
The very next day, they passed each other entering a chemistry lab. Startled to see him, Marilyn bumped a long table full of lab glassware. Nothing broke, but the rattling sound filled the room. She was flustered again. And again, Clovis thought she was “just precious.”
“Thus began 73 years (nine courtship, 64 marriage) of our love for each other,” he wrote.
When Clovis looks back on their marriage, it’s not the milestones that rise first, but the quiet, everyday rituals that shaped their life together. Marilyn was slow to wake when she wanted to be. In the mornings, she would find his shoulder and drift in and out of light sleep, adjusting her cuddle, making small sounds, until suddenly her head would pop up and she’d say a soft, cheerful “Hi!” It was a daily moment, ordinary to anyone else, but to Clovis, it was everything.
Equally important were their constant conversations. Talks about teaching, trips, the two houses they built, their children and the details of whatever mattered at the time. There was encouragement, enthusiasm and a willingness to help each other refine ideas and then act on them. Disagreements were common, he said, but compromise and change were normal too.
Marilyn, he wrote, “sparkled almost constantly.” She came from a family of humor. Her father and maternal grandfather were funny, lively people and her father was nearly a professional magician whose act leaned on good-natured comedy. The antics of their children, friends, television shows like Johnny Carson and The Dick Van Dyke Show kept her laughing.
One shared passion shaped their family life more than any other: travel. From about 1970 through 1978, the family spent four to seven weeks each summer tent camping across the United States, along with two early trips abroad. Their children still count those trips as some of the highlights of their lives.
When asked what love truly is, Clovis turned to “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quoting the exchange between the fox and the Little Prince about “taming” one another. About choosing someone until they are no longer one of many, but the only one. Love, he wrote, is more than affection. It includes commitment, the desire to please and the determination to protect and defend one another.
Marriage, he said, requires patience and energy, but above all, commitment. A willingness to sacrifice what you want to help the person you love achieve what matters to them, trusting they will do the same for you.
Today, Marilyn is gone. She passed away two years ago. But for Clovis, love did not end with loss.
He still talks with her, he wrote. He still tries to move through daily life the way he knows she would want him to. Her absence is real but so is her influence.
Seventy-three years after two awkward, tender moments in a high school hallway, Clovis remains devoted to the life they built together. The camping trips, the conversations, the laughter, the compromises still live inside him. Love, as he understands it, was never about possession or permanence. It was about choosing, committing, protecting and cherishing, again and again.
Even now, Marilyn remains part of his daily life. He talks to her constantly. He tries to do things the way he knows she would like them done, even if, as he admits, “She knows I’ll never cook right!”
For younger couples reading this on Valentine’s Day, Clovis offers simple advice: support, encourage, help, cherish. Never let your partner doubt that they are valued above all others. Do that, he says, and you may be surprised by how much joy comes from being the “prince to her fox”.
It’s a love story built not on grand declarations, but on decades of shared mornings, laughter, compromise and choice.
The kind of love that lasts.
