Still crazy for each other after all these years
Ed and Enid Ruzinsky
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Ed and Enid Ruzinsky. |
Ed Ruzinsky has been married to the former Enid Schnitzer for 58 years.
“I consider ourselves as dinosaurs,” he said. “You don’t hear of people married for that length of time,” he said.
They met as 17-year-olds, camp counselors at an overnight camp on Long Island. Ed’s older brother had worked with Enid at a day camp the summer before and asked her to look in on Ed, who was in charge of the five year olds.
“The rest is history.”
Dating at summer camp, he said, “is like living together, because it’s a children’s camp and the kids went to bed early.”
When camp ended that summer, “her parents were going on vacation and they invited me to go with them. We went up to Niagara Falls and into Canada. We started dating at that point. It became pretty obvious that it was enduring,” he said.
They were married two days after Enid’s last final exam four years later. She skipped graduation for the honeymoon.
The transition to married life wasn’t hard.
“We were young enough and innocent enough so that it didn’t get in the way. We were in love,” he said.
“We literally grew up together. We did everything together.
“Today it appears the kids live together, have families together, then they decide they’re going to get married. It’s a little different from our day,” he said.
And difficulties along the way?
“I don’t believe any marriage is a perfect marriage,” he said. “You get into situations where they may be a little more difficult than otherwise. We’ve been able to endure those without difficulties. We’ve always managed, whatever the issues might have been, to work through them, without any third-party interventions.”
“I would be in contact with her every day without exception, wherever I was, whether I was in the country or out of the country. We’ve always been very vocal and verbal. We’ve always celebrated anniversaries together – I always managed to be home for that.”
They have a son, 55, and a daughter, 52. Both have two children.
He doesn’t expect his grandchildren to follow in his footsteps and marry at age 21.
“That doesn’t seem to be the reality in today’s world,” he said. “My son was married when he was 31. When his son was born, he was 36. I said, ‘When I was 36, you were 12.’ That kind of cleared his sinuses a bit.”
Did he have any marriage advice when his children got married?
“I said to my son at the time, ‘If we don’t have grandchildren, what did we need you for?'”
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