Doris Marie Gaines

Doris Vanderpool was 8 years old when sher family moved to the rolling farm hills of southwest Portland, where developers would one day plant rows of houses.

Dick Gaines was 9, a proud owner of a donkey and pull-cart, who lived just down the road, ona five-acre plot. He heard the new neighbors had lots of kids - 10 or so - and figured more than a few would be girls.

Boy and beast pull up at the Vanderpool house on evening, to see if anyone wanted a ride in the cart. Only the 8-year-old daughter accepted. "Don't you write that," says Doris Gaines, 67 years and a golden anniversary later, "because he tells the wrong story." Dick Gaines gently pushes her aside and keeps talking. Listen to his story - right, wrong or otherwise - and you realize young lovers in this freeway world can learn a lot from a man, a woman and a burro that brought them together.

They sit at a round table, eating fruit salad and ham with a yellow sauce that tastes like it might be mustard, surrounded by couples with the same lunch and the same penchant for sticking to vows. Their King City community, The Highlands, boasts 400 residents - including 59 couples married for 50 years or more. It's more than enough for a formal club, The Golden Rings. Four times a year, they sip coffee, welcome new members, tell a few jokes. They swap stories of first glances and first kisses a half-century ago, of a world and an institution they have watched change.

Dick and Doris Gaines wed in 1948. By the end of 51', they had three children. Only one has stuck to marriage like their parents. The other two are divorced. The Gaineses' tablemates at the luncheon, Doreen and Art Hames, have seen two of their four children leave marriages. They say it plainly, with a sight grimace, between subjects. We went to Reno a month or two ago. Kids today just don't want to stick together. Flowers out back sure look nice this year. It would be easy to write them off, to call them cute, or relics, or particularly cute relics. As dated as the notion of farms off Taylor's Ferry Road. Marriage, and the people who get married, and what society expects from people who get married, that's all different now. Isn't it?

The donkey's name was Maggie, and she was, in fact, a failed hunting donkey. Dick's father bought the animal to carry packs into the wilderness. The first trip, Dick says, "they almost had to shoot it. They got it out and couldn't get it back." After also failing as a plow donkey, Maggie became Dick's pet. She pulled his cart at about one mile an hour, he thinks. The loop to and from the Vanderpool house stretched a mile and a half. When the cart reached the halfway point, the stories diverge. "It was about that time that I felt his hand on my shoulder," Doris says. "My mother had warned me about boys like that." Dick winks. "It was about then that I felt a hand on my knee."

He was a Navy gunner in World War II, clean-cut and handsome, quick with jokes. Romantic, Dick was not. They were driving in his '37 Plymouth convertible on a sunny afternoon when he tossed a paper bag Doris' way. Something glittered inside. "He said, 'See if this fits,'" she says. "He was pretty sure of himself." They married in St. Claire's Church in Southwest Portland a few months after Doris' 20th birthday, escaping post-ceremony pranks by slipping out a photographer's darkroom window after she took their pictures. They settled in Portland, moved to Spokane then Boise then back to the city where they fell in love. Dick put in 38 year at Standard Oil, working shifts, then management, retiring in 1985. He still wears the 30-year gold watch. Doris kept books for several companies, before the babies. The first boy came late in '48, the second in January '51. A daughter followed that December. Doris always wanted a girl. If that meant giving birth twice in one year, she says, then all right. Ask about the tough times, and they talk about the middle boy, Gary, who suffered from a condition they call "brittle bones." He broke 48 bones growing up, and three times doctors put him in a body cast. They took turns taking him to the doctor. Now, he's a claims analyst who travels for work. But Dick and Doris still head to the doctor's office regularly. Dick has diabetes, heart problems, breathing problems, kidney problems. He takes 22 pills a day. She watches what he eats, wards off would-be-hidden snacks that might upset his diabetic balance. He tries to sneak them anyway.

Daily, there are reminders that not even love lasts forever. At the Golden Rings luncheon late last month, a man slumps in his chair. His wife watches as paramedics load him, still breathing, onto a stretcher and carry him to the hospital. In a neighborhood where a quarter of the neighbors share a 50-year devotion to their spouses, there are also daily reminders that love lasts. Couples tend gardens, walk together, joke with the youngsters who've logged only 48 years of marriage. Doris and Dick offer hints on how to last 54 years: communication, respect, knowing each other well enough to find the snacks before they're hidden. "Be deaf," Dick says. "A sense of humor," Doris says. HInts, but no secrets. They just both knew they wanted to spend their lives together, and they worked their hardest to make that happen. It seems so simple, almost naive. They have a theory on the rise in divorce - that young people today hop[ down the altar too soon and for the wrong reasons. "You don't want to say it's mostly physical, but it is," Doris says. "And when that's gone, what have you got?" It seems dismissive of the complex pressures couples face. Of the decline, since Dick and Doris were young, in peer pressure to stay together (few, if any, of their high school classmates have divorced). It seems to ignore the fact that not all long marriages are good ones. But their marital rearview isn't tinged rose, either. "There is no happily ever after," Doris says. "Well, it is happily ever after, but there are a lot of things you get upset about. You get through 'em...I'm a challenge to him, and he is to me." After 54 years of challenges, do they ever get tired of each other? Doris: "I don't think so."

Dick: "Not more than five or six times a week."

The burro and the boy dropped Doris off at her house after an hour or so in the cart. Dick came back the next night. This time, brothers and sisters wanted to come, too. The cart trips stopped after that. Her interest did not. "I liked him," Doris says. "He was a cute little guy." Later, she rests her fork on her plate and leans across the table, away from Dick. She lowers her voice. "I couldn't imagine being with anyone else." she says, almost whispering, a smile curling on her lips. "And I had lots of choices."

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.finleysunsethills.com for the Gaines family.