This or That

Harvey, 104, and Irma, 93, get their moment in the spotlight

Bob CollinsBob Collins Sep 7, 2017
5

Here’s today’s daily dose of sweetness:

What are the odds that there is a long-married couple who share the names of two hurricanes, whose story is every bit as compelling as the ones surrounding their meteorological namesakes?

The New York Times has found Irma and Harvey, a cute old couple married 75 years who happen to share the names of two pretty famous hurricanes.

The Schluters live nowhere near hurricane country; they’re from Washington state.

Harvey has seen this hurricane thing before. It was first used as a storm name by the weather office in 1981 and has been used six times. But there’s never been an Irma in the same season before because the rotating list of tropical storm names used Irene up until it was retired — as the names of particularly bad storms are — in 2011.

Harvey and Irma on the hurricane map together will never happen again. One or both names will probably be retired. And it all has happened in the nick of time for the Schluters. Harvey is 104. Irma is 93.

Hurricanes are great stories, but you know what’s almost always a better one? Two people, married 75 years. The Schluters do not disappoint.

The two were wed in 1942 and, after a brief stint living in Fort Meade, Md., while Mr. Schluter was still in the Army, they returned to Washington.

While he went to work as a barber, she found life at home lonely. Both had grown up in big families and it seemed only natural to begin to take in groups of foster children, many of them physically or mentally disabled. In a story to mark their anniversary in March, The Spokesman-Review of Spokane reported that they had taken in 120 children over the decades, a number that Mrs. Schluter confirmed.

Mr. Schluter opened his own business in the Hillyard suburb of Spokane, Harvey’s Shop, and worked as a barber for 45 years. But he told The Spokesman-Review in 2013 that his most rewarding life achievement was being a foster parent (along with playing the banjo).

The couple have dodged a few hurricanes in their day while traveling the country, but nothing like what they expect the people of the southeast and in Texas are going through.

At an anniversary party earlier this year, a reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review asked Irma why they took in more than 100 children who were abandoned by parents?

“I don’t know, we just did,” she said. “They were interesting little people.”