Nursing home celebrates 75-year love story

SYLVANIA, Ohio (WUPW) - The Arbors at Sylvania helped a special couple mark their birthdays this week. He’s 97  years young and she just turned 92 Friday. Next year, they’ll be married 75 years.

It’s an enduring love story that will touch your heart.

“I’ve got to give you a kiss once in a while,” Lou Pertcheck told his wife Pearl as he delivered a smooch on the head.

Ninety-seven-year old Lou Pertcheck still patiently pushes his 92-year old wife Pearl through the hallways of the nursing home where the couple likely will live their last days together.

 “I came here for seven years to visit her until I fell and wound up here,” he said.

Married in 1938, the couple has been through their ups and downs over seven decades-- especially when Pearl suffered a stroke.

 “Doctor came up and he looked at me and said she’s going to be a vegetable the rest of her life — and he waited for me,” Lou recalled. “The only thing I could figure, he waited for me to say ‘Well, let her go.’ So I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’”

‘Til death do us part is a vow Lou takes very seriously.

 “I didn’t get married to get a divorce. She’s been wonderful,” he said.

Pearl was the daughter of a family friend, but the two never talked in their younger years. Lou admits she left him speechless.

“I just looked at her,” he admitted. “I was very timid and backward," he said.

That is, until one night, when a friend encouraged him to attend a dance.

“He said ‘Why don’t you come and I’ll introduce you to my girlfriend.’ He said ‘You can have a dance with her. So I went. He introduced me to the girl and that was the last time he saw her,” he recalled with a chuckle. “Of course, I saw her every night for a couple weeks and we got married," he said.

The couple loved to dance.

“They wouldn’t look at me, they watched her dance,” he said with a smile. “I was so proud of her.”

But Lou got used to life with a beautiful bride.

 “Wherever she went, she was bothered by men because there was something about her that did that,” he said. “If that young lady lived where there was wealthy people and so many men asked her to go out, she could have married a millionaire instead of a little man like me.”

Lou gave a valentine to his Pearl one year, signing it the best one he’d ever found that fits her. It reads: “Love has no beginning or end. Only an ever-changing beauty all its own.

"Last few months there’s been a change,” Lou said as he fed his wife birthday cake.  “It can’t be helped. A stroke is a terrible thing.”

But to Lou, Pearl will always be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

 “I wouldn’t trade her for anything in the world,” he said with obvious conviction.