WESTLOCK - Wally and Rosanna Sczebel are celebrating their 75th Christmas as a married couple this year as well as their 74th wedding anniversary.
They were married in a little Church of God on the south side of Edmonton the day before Christmas, Dec. 24, 1946.
“The church is no longer there,” Rossana said. “We were married by Rev. Chad. That was his name; I remember that.”
She also recalled there were only a few people present, partly because it was winter. Her mom was not all that well, so she couldn’t come, but her dad and her brother came. Her brother was the best man.
“Dad had this old car; it was called a Whippet. And Wally’s brother, George, came from Saskatchewan. He was the only one from Wally’s side of the family, other than his sister Kay, that lived in Jarvie. She was married to Bill Longhurst.”
Jarvie was home to Rosanna Medcke, and it was through this sister that she met Wally. “Her daughter Marjorie was four or five years old at the time, and was our flower girl.”
Following the wedding, they had a professional wedding portrait taken at a studio on Edmonton’s Jasper Avenue (see the photo below) which is also no longer there.
After the photo shoot, Rosanna said her dad took them to the King Edward Hotel in downtown Edmonton (also no longer there) to the restaurant. “It was very busy. I was in my wedding gown. As we were seating in a booth — my dad, my brother and Wally and me. I don’t remember if his sister and the little flower girl were there too, but I think they did. We had lunch there. I still remember this guy looking over from another booth, and he said, “Oh my goodness. What a good Christmas present,” she said, laughing.
She also remembered, “It was a beautiful day. It was a beautiful, beautiful day.”
After lunch, they drove back to Jarvie, and she said it started snowing.
“We were in the back seat, and my Dad and brother in the front. We got past Pickardville — the old road, not the highway we have now. And dad went in the ditch because there was so much snow. I got up and was going to go out the door before Wally even did, and he grabbed me and said, ‘Where are you going?’ and I said push, of course. He said, ‘You’re not going,’ and he pushed me back in. It was so funny. Push, of course, because that’s what us kids always had to do.”
Apparently, with the dirt roads of the day and raining, that was a common enough occurrence. “And the kids got out and pushed,” she said.
That was just one of the interesting and what Rosanna referred to as funny things around their wedding day and the days that followed. Christmas Day was a combination of Christmas and Wedding dinner, and the snow kept coming down.
“We got stranded at the farm at Jarvie. You couldn’t go anywhere. You couldn’t even get out of the yard, there was so much snow.” She said Wally had a job cutting hair at Stony Plain. “We were supposed to go there after Christmas. It was five days before we could get to Jarvie to catch the (passenger) train to go to Stony Plain.”
“Our honeymoon was upstairs in the farmhouse, and there were no rooms up there. And all the kids (her siblings) were sleeping around us,” she laughed.
“No privacy.”
A photo was the beginning
Rosanna said when she was 13 or 14, one of Wally’s sisters, Marie Williams was an Apostolic preacher, and she and her husband preached at the little log church at Cedar Creek and also in Jarvie. Another sister, Kay, came out to visit. She and Rosanna got along really well, and she took a picture of Rosanna with her little Brownie camera.
Rosanna said, “When she went home, she showed it to Wally and said, ‘I have a girl for you.’ He looked at that picture and said, ‘I’m going to marry her one day;’ before he even met me.”
After they did finally meet, when she was just 15, they began courting, and courted for two and a half years before they were married 74 years ago.
The rest is history. Today, at age 91 and 96 respectively, Rosanna and Wally still live in their own home just a short distance west of Legal, and still enjoy pretty good health.
Her daughter Ione says, “They’re the best parents that I could have had!”
