Centre County greatest love stories: It started with a wink

Editor’s note: Recently, the Centre Daily Times set out to find Centre County’s greatest love story. We called for submissions and nominations, asking anyone with a love story to tell — their own or someone else’s — to share the love tales with us. For CDT staff, selecting a winner was more difficult than we’d expected. We had an entry about the unbreakable bond between parent and child, a heartwarming tale of love that blossomed at a soccer game and inspiring stories of long-lasting relationships where the partners still call each other “Valentine.” In a contest sponsored by Pizza Mia and with the grand prize of a $100 gift card to the restaurant, we selected Jim and Evelyn Wagner as the winners, but one thing is clear: There’s plenty of love in Centre County.

It’s probably wrong to talk about love by the numbers, but consider the following a simple and superfluous exercise in romantic accounting.

In June, Jim and Evelyn Wagner, of Boalsburg, will have been married for 53 years. They have three children, eight grandchildren, two matching college degrees and a more than 100 year-old farmhouse between them.

Again, on the off chance that love is like golf and the lowest score wins, it’s never a good idea to judge these things by the math, which is very useful for balancing the family checkbook but has strict limitations when it comes to assessing the quality of a life that has been built steadily brick by brick over the last half a century.

If you really want to get a sense of the type of home you’re stepping into, look at the photo album. The one that the Wagner’s took off of the shelf was professionally bound and the photos inside were printed directly onto the page like a high school yearbook.

A loose newspaper clipping served as a makeshift bookmark and featured the smiling face of a young girl, their granddaughter in New Jersey, who recently won a science competition.

“That’s just a brag,” Evelyn said.

The album was a visual history of their entire clan, snapshots paired with rhyming couplets doting on their children, and then their children’s children. All involved appear happy, healthy and smiling.

And it all quite literally winked into existence.

The year was 1956. The place was Western Pennsylvania. Evelyn was the daughter of a local auto mechanic and a fixture in the high school band. Jim was the son of a coal miner who occasionally enjoyed batting his eyelashes at the comely clarinet player in homeroom.

These are the once and future Wagners.

The band’s annual “Snowball Dance” was fast approaching and Evelyn didn’t have a date. She had resolutely decided not to attend when she got to thinking about that guy in homeroom, the one who kept winking at her.

“That was my opening. As I recall it took quite a few winks,” Jim said.

The dance must have gone well because when Jim invited Evelyn to the movies the following week, she accepted.

The continued dating throughout the rest of high school — steadily, she said, off and on, according to him — and were still together when they both attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

On most days they ate lunch together, usually on a park bench or sometimes in the car if the weather mandated.

Jim popped the question on Valentine’s Day during their junior year of college — or at least Evelyn tells him that he did. He’s a little fuzzy on that part.

“He actually got down on one knee and he actually talked to my father first,” Evelyn said.

They married on June 15, 1962, as newly-minted graduates of higher education. In other words, they were poor.

Now, almost 53 years later, they’re doing better than fair. Jim was the vice president for business at Penn State, and Evelyn is a retired home economics teacher. They take a special kind of pride in knowing that everything they have, they built together.

The Wagners have an old farmhouse in Western Pennsylvania that they are in the process of restoring and often venture a little farther afield, hiking in Switzerland or touring America’s national parks.

“We think alike. We like the same things,” Evelyn said.

There are minor exceptions, of course. Jim doesn’t have a musical bone in his body, and Evelyn, who has been going to football games with her husband for the last 40 years, is not what you would call a “fan.”

Their secret is that they continue to not only love one another, but manage to like each other as well.

Evelyn said that he makes her feel beautiful. Jim admires her great patience. Or, on a more domestic scale, he fills the car with gas, she washes his socks and underwear.

“You just keep caring,” Evelyn said.

This weekend, they’ll fly to Dallas to visit their oldest son. Both of the Wagners are concentrated on maintaining their health and keeping active — at least long enough to fill up another photo album together.

“We have a long ways to go,” Jim said.

This story was originally published February 12, 2016 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Centre County greatest love stories: It started with a wink."