The Fifty-Year Marriage
Patrick and Shirley Dunne are my parents. Pat and Shirley celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary on September 19, 2020. They married with little fanfare but great love in a tiny church in Portland, Oregon. After the ceremony, they did not go to a wedding reception. There wasn’t one. Instead, they went to the hospital to share the day with my mom’s father who was healing from a heart attack. Little did they know that in these first decisions they made as a couple they were setting the priority for their fifty-year path. They met at the University of Oregon –
