Great friends treasure life together

Phillip and Marian McVey on campus during a recent visit.

Phillip McVey spouts endearing wisecracks as he talks about the 51 years he's been with his wife, Marian. Slowly grinning, he teases that he married her when he was an Ohio University instructor so she would mimeograph his tests before class.

But despite Phillip's jest, the 78-year-old still sees Marian as the same beautiful, thoughtful woman who unknowingly charmed him in the fall of 1947 as she ran the university's duplicating service on Wilson Hall's first floor.

"I think the thing that happened to us is that we're best friends," says Phillip, who taught marketing from 1947 to 1951. "You have to be able to talk about everything and be yourself, and she has let me be me."

Phillip was exploring his life's path in 1947 when he graduated from Harvard Business School and began teaching at Ohio University. A loner on a rural campus of about 4,000 students, Phillip's heart quickened when he first met Marian Crossen.

"She was, I thought, quite beautiful," he says. "She was a friendly person, and I needed a friend at that time."

Phillip asked her for a date. "We went to a Bible lecture in the old student union," says Marian, who graduated from Ohio University in 1943. "On the way home, I wondered if he would try to kiss me and what I would do if he did. But he didn't. We just had fun together."

The next summer, they were married in Alexander Presbyterian Church, near Marian's family farm in Albany, Ohio. They have spent most of their years in Lincoln, Neb., where Phillip ran the marketing department at the University of Nebraska for 27 years. Now retired, they frequently travel to Australia and to visit their three children and four grandchildren who live in various parts of the country.

"We've had quite a life together," Marian says.