Their story, told in their own words.
Bound for good.

Margaret was eleven the first winter she worked the counter at her father’s bakery, standing on a milk crate so she could reach the register. The shop opened at five, but the ovens were lit long before that, and the whole block knew it. “You could smell it before you could see it,” she says. “Bread in the morning meant everything was still all right.”

The bakery survived two recessions and one fire, and Margaret can name every neighbor who helped rebuild it. Her father never wrote anything down — not recipes, not debts, not favors. “He kept it all in his head,” she remembers, “and he never once forgot who’d been kind to us.”

The drive between Margaret’s town and Walter’s took an hour and ten minutes in good weather, and Walter made it every Saturday for two years — through hail, harvest, and one blizzard that closed the road behind him. “I married him because he kept showing up,” she says, laughing. “There were handsomer men. None of them ever showed up.”

They were married in the spring of 1958, in a church with a leaking roof and every pew full. Walter’s brother drove the wedding car; the bakery provided the cake, of course. “My father cried into the frosting,” Margaret says. “He denied it his whole life. We all saw it.”