Pat and John Collins’ 50-year marriage they built on faith.
That story, they agree, starts at St. Bernard Catholic Church in 1969.
Pat, who’d graduated from Mt. Lebanon High School in 1954, was teaching children religion — faith formation — at the landmark church. The story will come back to her.
John, who grew up in Beechview, had graduated from the then-all-boys South Hills Catholic High School (now Seton LaSalle) in 1965. The Vietnam War was raging and so, after a taste of becoming a Christian Brother, he’d enlisted in the Navy. Because he worked with his father in his refrigeration company, he was able to join that branch’s Seabees construction unit to ply that trade including during two deployments in Vietnam.
After he got out early and returned home to Dormont, he heard during one Mass that St. Bernard’s was looking for more people to teach children about religion and thought, “I could do that.”
It just so happens that he and Pat wound up both teaching eighth graders. Gradually they got to know each other. In 1974, once she started working as the secretary in the education office, John took to going there after classes to read the Sunday paper. He thought she was exceptionally nice. Pat saw his yellow plaid pants and peach polyester shirt and thought he was the biggest nerd.
In 1968, she lost her father after a car accident and her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor that killed him in 1970, when she became a widow with daughters ages 10 and 8. Even four years later, she wasn’t looking for another man.
John says he wasn’t looking, either — he wasn’t exactly a ladies’ man — but he may have stolen some glances from behind his newspaper.
“I’m 40 years old at this time,” Pat recalls. “He’s 12 years younger than me. I had two teenage girls, and they’re a handful. I didn’t need anything else in my life.”
She pauses. John says nothing. She says, “But I liked him.”
They went on their first date to ring in 1975 — a bring-your-own-bottle New Year’s Eve party at the church. When they arrived, no one else was there yet, so John took Pat to view the Downtown skyline from the Mount Washington overlook.
They still laugh that the “ancient” band played “Hail to Pitt” instead of “Auld Lang Syne.” They still laugh about a lot.
But no story that lasts 50 years is all happy. That February, after visiting her boss’s wife at the then-St. Clair Hospital maternity ward, John casually asked Pat, “Would you marry me?”
“Are you out of your mind?!” she replied. She decided right then to break it off.
Her daughters — Kathleen, by then 15, and Suzie, 13 — soon intervened, using their loving nickname for the uber polite John. “You know you like Mr. Sorry,” Suzie told her mom, “and we like Mr. Sorry ….” (John apparently had learned something from growing up the only boy with four sisters.)
Pat and John married on Aug. 16, 1975 — you know where. They held their reception at the Sunset Hills neighborhood house to which Pat and her daughters had moved in 1971, where the couple still live today.
A lot has changed. The garage where they celebrated as newlyweds is now stuffed with, well, stuff. Kathleen and Suziegot married and had four and two children, respectively. Then Kathleen got breast cancer in 1998 and died after suffering for nearly five years.
“I don’t think I could have survived that without John,” says Pat. She’s 90 and has, while surviving some big health challenges herself, outlived her mother, brother and many friends.
Other things haven’t changed much at all. John, who still has plenty of family around, still works at his Collins Refrigeration Co. at a semiretired age of 78. Sitting on their front porch near his trademark white van, chatting about the five decades that passed before they knew it, they laugh and smile about a lot of it. Him perpetually being on call to fix things at Kennywood amusement park. Their multiple cruises — favorite: the Panama Canal — and other vacations, including to Hershey and Disney with the kids and one during which they flew to Aruba like packages in a retrofitted brown UPS plane.
One of their favorite pastimes was just sitting in their dining room listening to Johnny Mathis 78-rpm records together. John’s song is “The Sweetheart Tree.” Pat’s is “The Twelfth of Never” (“and that’s a long, long time”).
“We really haven’t had an argument,” Pat says with her hand touching his, “until last Sunday.”
That was just the stress of being deep into planning their 50th anniversary dinner set for Saturday evening at Gaetano’s, the-now banquet center that has been a customer of Collins Refrigerationsince John was 14. They’re expecting about 70 guests, including some of their six great-grandchildren. (Full disclosure: I will be there, as the Collinses are my neighbors.) The couple decided to go to the effort to mark making it to 50 years, Pat says, because, “It’s not something a lot of people do.”
About 20 years ago, Pat and John changed churches, to St. Anne’s in Castle Shannon, and they’re very much at home there, every Sunday morning. John is a Eucharistic minister, giving Communion to members who need an extra hand. The morning after their party, Mass will be dedicated to the couple, the new priest will bless them, and they’ll bring him the bread and wine. It’s perfectly fitting, since Pat’s confident that God had a hand in bringing her John.
“The Lord made a very special person, and I’m very glad to have him,” she says, explaining that if there’s any secret to their success, it’s that “we’ve been really kind to each other.”
“We really love each other,” Pat says.
John smiles and says, “No doubt about that.”
