"I can remember he had on brown-striped pants and a shirt and a necktie and a brown leather jacket," Bea said. "And I had been watching him dance, so when he came and asked me to dance I danced with him."
Elmer remembered that he and his friends were just out to dance and to see who could get the most girls to dance with them. Before the dance was over she had agreed to go out with him.
"I found out later that he had also made a date with another girl for that same night, but he came and got me," Bea said.
Elmer was born and raised on a farm in the small community of Wentworth about nine miles from Madison where his future wife and her eight brothers and sisters lived.
He remembers his life on the farm with his 11 siblings as a good life with pretty much all they needed being raised on site, including vegetables and meat.
"During the real depression the only thing my folks bought at the store was flour, sugar and spices," Elmer said. "We couldn't afford breakfast food. We couldn't afford boughten bread. It was all homemade, but we had three meals a day, too."
The couple had been dating a while when one day they walked out of a movie theater into a snowstorm to find that Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, had been bombed by Japan. A momentous day in more than one way as he also chose that day to pop the question and 18-year-old Beatrice Jean Hartman said yes. The day was Dec. 7, 1941.
Elmer decided to attend an Omaha, Neb., trade school to learn to build airplanes and after graduation went to California to work at the Consolidated Aircraft (later Convair) plant in San Diego for 60 cents an hour. The plant manufactured the famous PBY Catalina flying boat.
"I'd never been in California before, coming off the farm. Quite a difference!" he said.
Meanwhile the future Mrs. Larson went to Detroit, Mich., with her dad and they stayed at her grandparents' home where she slept on the couch and ended up with a job as a filing clerk with General Motors. Her aunts and grandmother determined that she would not be going to California to marry Larson. But she had other ideas and when she received her first monthly paycheck she was ready to use most of it to get to her true love, so she took the $94 check to her grandmother's who promptly charged her $90 for room and board, which meant that she didn't have the money to leave!
When Elmer found out he sent her the money to come to him. A few days later her aunt took her to the bus depot supposedly to catch a bus to South Dakota. After a while her aunt began to get suspicious because as buses were announced Bea wasn't getting on any. Eventually one for California was called and her great aunt, and fellow conspirator, told her to get on it and with her other aunt calling her a bad name she went off to a new life.
"It took me five days and four nights," Bea said. "We stopped and stayed overnight in places. I was scared to death because I'd never been on a bus or never traveled, so I set right behind the driver."
Elmer had already rented a room for her that was not too far from him and shortly she began working at the same plant where he was employed, so they could walk or ride together. During the war years use of cars was discouraged and gas was rationed to four gallons a week.
"I got there on the (May) 10th and we were married on the (May) 23rd (1942)," Bea said.
Two years later Elmer was drafted into the Navy and eventually stationed in Shelton, Wash., just north of Olympia, Wash.
"We had a baby by that time. We didn't have much furniture or much stuff and we used a dresser drawer for a baby bed," Elmer said. He hitchhiked back and forth to the base for a while before they were able to get a car.
After a couple of years he was then discharged in 1946 and they moved back to South Dakota where they farmed just outside of Madison.
"That's where our kids were raised," Elmer said. "They all turned out so good I couldn't believe it," Bea said.
One of her most vivid memories of life on the farm was when she had taken her babies and set them on a trailer while she climbed onto a tractor and began pulling the load first downhill and then uphill when the tractor stopped.
"It had no brakes and here were my three kids in this trailer going down the hill backwards!" she said. "I was so scared I didn't know what to do." However, she was able to get everyone down the hill safely making an oath never to drive a tractor again.
After they left farming in 1963 they went back to San Diego, but the place had changed a lot over the last couple of decades and not necessarily for the better, so they moved up to the Los Angeles area and he found a job in a box factory outside Fullerton, Calif.
It was in Fullerton that they bought their first home, paying $500 down with monthly payments of $131.
A few years later they moved north to San Leandro, Calif., where he was involved in the tile trade. "Probably the worst job I had while I was in California," he said.
Later they bought a rental business in Oakland, Calif., and it became successful, but it also involved a lot of hard work.
"Seven days a week, 24 hours a day," Bea said. When they decided to retire from Lar's Rentals in the mid 1970s they sold it to their son and his wife.
Bea's sister, Rozanne Broomhead, lived in Winnemucca and they had visited here at different times and liked the area, so they decided to move here. She also moved her Bea's Antiques to Winnemucca.
Since arriving in Winnemucca she has volunteered at Poke and Peak and the Pleasant Senior Center and Elmer has been on the senior center board. Retired or not Elmer was not interested in rotting away in front of a television and began to accrue some fixer-upper residences they turned into rentals until he eventually had 24 of them. Although he has sold off most of them he still has a couple of tenants.
Elmer said the community has been good to them and he likes the way people here help others when there's a need. Bea really likes the way the medical community has been of help to her and in particular Humboldt General Hospital.
"The people are so helpful," she said. "I have really enjoyed going to the hospital for my medical needs because they are so helpful and so nice."
They said that staying together for 70 years has not always been easy, but Bea said relationships need to have give and take attitudes.
"You can't walk away from problems. You have to get them solved," she said. "These kids nowadays, divorce is nothing, they just walk away. I don't think that's good."
They said that they can still argue on occasion and see nothing wrong with it, but they still like each other and don't really fight. "We're well satisfied with each other. We do get along once in a while," Bea said, laughing.
Elmer said that young couples seem to want everything right away and take on a lot of debt and can't go out and enjoy themselves.
"We started out with an oil barrel and a piece of plywood for a kitchen table and peach crates for chairs. People are so spoiled." he said.
"People use those credit cards too much," Bea said. "We're debt free. If people would live together for 70 years like we have without their credit cards they'd be all right."
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