Valentine’s Day Couple of 2010

“Love” and “working together” have kept Frannie and Carl Maphis of Grand Ridge happily married for more than six decades. They will celebrate their 64th Valentines’ Day together this weekend and they had quite a story to tell the TIMES on Monday.

The interview turned into a laugh riot because both Carl and especially Frannie are so witty they can hardly deliver a straight line. For example, Carl explained the couple’s whirlwind two-month romance in 1945 that resulted in their quickly wedding in Donalsonville, Ga.: “I found what I wanted and went after it!” Without missing a beat, Frannie said, “And I was so silly I didn’t say no!”

Carl had just finished fighting the Germans in North Africa and Italy through the duration fo the second world war. Frannie had just finished Sneads high school. Carl lived and farmed in “Paramore,” a thriving community east of Lovedale/Two-Egg many times more populated then than now. She lived in Sneads and was in the graduating class of 1945, with the late Pete McDaniel. To avoid the “rigmarole,” Carl’s description, of blood tests and licensing required in Jackson County, the couple virtually eloped to the Las Vegas wedding city of the day, Donalsonville, Ga.

“I had just graduated,” Frannie said, “and we had a Halloween party where we re-met. We got married in January.” Carl had finished Sneads school in 1940 after leaving “Central School” closer to home because it closed in 1936. He said he was drafted for one year in the Army in 1941 and was on a bus returning home the day Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. So much for the year in the Army. He was sent to the 3rd Army and went to World War II.

So how did Frannie and Carl stay together for so many years? “Cause we loved one another,” Frannie said. “We just raised five children. We both worked at Chattahoochee and we were together almost all the time.” Carl says almost the same thing: “We stayed together cause that’s what makes a family. We worked together, slept together, whatever we did we were together.”

They even worked on the farm side-by-side. “If I drove one tractor,” Carl said, “she drove the other.” Sometimes she would “drive” or guide a mule pulling a turpentine barrel. It was okay, she said, except for once when a boy mischievously placed a pine cone under the mule’s tail: “That mule went to kickin’ every which way.”

Circumstance, perhaps is was providence, got the Maphises off the farm after the great flood of east Jackson County in the late 1940s. “It put us out of business,” Carl said. They bought some land from the Gissendanner family across U.S. 90 from the old Hill’s Truck Stop and moved to Grand Ridge. But the couple found work, together of course, at Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee. “I worked with the men,” Carl said. “She worked with the women.” She retired in 1975 and he retired in 1980.

But they had plenty of children and grandchildren to keep them busy. The first of their children was Randolph, then Bill, then Lynda, then Jane, and then Iris who today runs her florist shop on the homestead in Grand Ridge. They have, so far, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren.

Providence is once again visiting Carl and Frannie, this time of a more serious nature. Carl, 93, is under hospice care for emphysema and COPD. Covenant Hospice of Marianna, which Frannie and Iris call “wonderful,” has named Frannie and Carl their Valentine’s Day Couple of 2010.