It seems like just yesterday that Edward Jarisch married Veronique, or "Mickey" Mercedes McFarland. Well, it was not quite yesterday, but Jan. 18, 1941, a mere 70 years ago. They wed in Edward's mother's living room at her 4725 Findlay home where he grew up. He robbed the cradle. Ed is 93. Mickey is 87. But she was just 16 and he was 23 when they married.

According to a newspaper wedding announcement now framed in their Alki home room where they live with their son and daughter, Mike and Marion, "Miss McFarland was escorted by her father and wore a rose taffeta gown with orchid corsage. Her sister, Mrs. Roy Claboe, was her only attendant, in an Alice blue taffeta gown and corsage of pink and white carnations."

At their recent anniversary party at their home, a purple orchid, Ed's anniversary gift to Mickey, stood proudly by the couch.

"I gave Ed a hug," Mickey laughed.

"We met at my sister's house, at a party," Mickey recalled. "Ed was supposed to take me home and he didn't do that. He took me some place else, down to a place on the beach where we kissed and smooched."

"I had a 1930 Model-A Ford Roadster with a rumble seat," Ed recalled with a proud grin.

"My parents didn't care about our age difference, they had so many girls," Mickey said. "He was a nice fellow. They liked him. He had a job."

Ed attended Gatewood Grade School, then Madison Middle School in 1927, the year it opened, and graduated West Seattle High School in 1935. He worked in the Civil Conservation Corp Camp on the Skagit River, then with the WPA.

Mickey attended Jefferson Grade School, where Jefferson Square now is, Madison, and West Seattle High School.

Ed was hired as a firefighter three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, driving the trucks and manning the pumps. He retired 25 years later but continued working with carpentry and home-building. He worked at a fire station now gone which was on Massachusetts Av. by Elliott Bay, by what is now the Coast Guard Station. His younger brother Fred also put in 25 years at the Department, at the station on 35th Av. here. Fred is gone now, but Ed still has two close friends he worked with at the station, John Maulsby and Wally Scherer who lives near Fauntleroy.

"I can remember when I was five or six the milkman had a horse and buggy and delivered to our house," said Ed. "Then there was the 'coffee man', a door-to-door salesman. Anything he could make a buck on, he would sell it. Caswell's Coffee, that was his main thing he'd sell, by the pound, ground, and canned foods, eggs, butter, even meat. My dad used to go down to the Pike Place Market to shop on Saturday afternoons just before the vendors packed up Saturday night because they'd give him a deal so they wouldn't have to carry their produce back.

"Dad died when I was about 16," said Ed. "My mother was an old-country woman who barely spoke English, just German, and this was during the Depression. I had to help support the family. I wouldn't have made it were it not for the neighbors who would help us, like John Curzon. He owned a butcher shop in the Alaska Junction. There used to be a little shopping mall on the northeast corner with a shoe store. Behind that was a shopping area, a grocery store, and his butcher shop."

When Mickey was younger she preferred the trolly to get to school.

"I fell out of my dad's car," she recalled. "Then I went around to the back of the house and cried. And it was only 2 or 3 cents to ride the trolley to school."