WIVES – A BIG ADVANTAGE
By Rich Loudenback
Regular readers of InlandNWReport have noticed that we haven’t posted any new articles now for over two weeks. That’s because my wonderful wife of 61 years, Rene’ passed away on Dec. 3 from Alzheimer’s Disease. She was in her 9th year with what was called Dementia and went down hill quite rapidly this last year. Her obituary will be in the Coeur d’Alene Press this Sunday the 21st. I feel like I didn’t deserve her.
So it is that I wish to pay her an additional meaningful tribute which is an edited take-off of a tribute I gave her 41 years ago when we published a trade newspaper named ‘Carolina Retailing News’ that went to 12K retailers in the consumer durable goods industry.
I wrote a monthly column and titled this one as above on our then 20th wedding anniversary. Skipping some of the lead-in about the then first year’s successes with the newspaper, I will launch into my tribute to wives (such as Rene’) thusly:
“It would be easy here to get off on a tangent telling you how great my (materialistically, of course) wife, Rene’ is. How, when she worked out of the home, she used to take stenography as fast as I can talk (and some would say, ‘That’s saying something’). How she sets all the type in this newspaper, does darkroom photographic work, and builds ads. How she has, without the benefit of having taken a tailoring course made me two sport coats and a suit and countless shirts, pants and knitted sweaters and most recently my ‘Carolina Retailing News’ photographers reversable vest, a blue vest with tan letters on the back, the reverse, a tan vest with blue letters, on the back and six large pockets on each version’s front for new and used film. She also built a greenhouse from scratch, built outside cedar shutters for all the house windows, built an elaborate patio cover for a widowed neighbor, ran her own wallpaper business, built our photographic darkroom, rebuilt and repaired many countless forgotten things. But I’m not going to do that.
“Incidentally, she’s not perfect. Although she’s a great cook, she hates cooking and doesn’t agree with me on many things. But there’s hope she says. She also says that I’ll come around to her points of view, eventually.
“She tolerated my heavy travel, an average of 151 nights a year out of town for several years and has been most helpful and supportive of me.
“It takes special traits of maturity to be the wife of a traveling man (salesman) in my case. His preoccupations, moodiness, travel requirements, and time demands can be taxing on family life. Especially, a real ‘sell or starve’ straight commissioned salesman, who must draw on all his resources to make things happen. His moments of rest and exercise, his planning, preparation and actual implementation of what it is that he does is all affected positively or negatively, directly or indirectly by his relations, feedback, and support of this most important person in his life.
“So, we can look at our wives’ worth to what we do in one of two ways. One helluva blessing. Or a very expensive way to get our laundry done free.
