By Khalida Sarwari
There was a time when Prince Charming and happily ever after really existed–and not just in Disney movies. One real-life story is tucked away at a 100-year-old home on Saratoga Avenue, and it is that of Bob and Anne Louden.
“Now, people don’t believe that, but they did then and a few of us were lucky enough to make it come true,” Bob Louden said, sitting in his living room surrounded by a lifetime of mementos.
The Loudens, both 82 and married for nearly 61 years, count themselves as among the lucky few. They met in the fifth grade, after Bob’s family moved from Indiana to Cleveland where Anne and her family lived. The year was 1941 and the U.S. had just entered World War II. Bob’s father was hired at a chemical plant as part of the Manhattan Project. By the time they were 15, the war came to an end and Bob and Anne were in love.
When they were 18 and went off to college–Bob to Princeton and Anne to Vassar–they promised each other they would keep in regular correspondence. And they did everything possible at that time to bridge the 120-mile gap between their two campuses. They wrote to each other every day and would see each other almost every other weekend. Bob recalled how Anne would either take the train–two each way–or a taxicab to visit him at Princeton.
Today, 900 of Anne’s original letters are on display in a special collection at Vassar College, and in 1995 the couple made a copy of each letter that’s now bound in a spiral notebook with a photo of the two of them on the cover smiling at each other at a dance at Princeton. And just to be really safe, Bob had the letters digitized and saved in a PDF file. His own letters to Anne, unluckily, were accidentally thrown away by Anne’s mother.
“I’ve always been in love with her and if she took the trouble of writing 900 letters, I felt they were worth preserving,” he said. “Anyone who wants to see what romance was like 60 years ago can go look at those letters.”
The distance between them was not ideal, but at the time Princeton was all-male and Vassar was an all-female school, Bob said. He chose the school from among a list of other Ivy Leagues that offered him acceptance letters because of one prominent physicist–Albert Einstein–who taught there at the time.
“The decision to go to Princeton and the decision to marry Anne were the two biggest decisions of my life,” he said.
In 1952, when Bob and Anne turned 21 and were on the brink of graduation, marriage was a foregone conclusion.
“We sent both sets of parents a letter saying, ‘We’re going to marry and we hope you can come,’ ” Bob said.
With just a few months left before graduation, the two tied the knot on April 5. It was a whirlwind year for the couple, who would go on to graduate from college and in September celebrate Anne’s first pregnancy. Soon after, the couple moved to Indiana, and the following year Bob began pursuing his master’s degree at Purdue University and Anne had their first son, Burt. In the beginning, the couple had modest means, living off of Bob’s $150 per month scholarship and driving a used car.
“But when you’re young and in love like that, you don’t need much. Just being together is the main goal,” said Bob.
Anne had planned to study library science at Purdue, but she put those plans on hold for another 20 years to have her second and third sons, Bruce and Jeff. She would go on to receive her degree from San Jose State University and work as a librarian at various high schools in the Saratoga area.
Bob, however, began his career in aeronautical engineering right away, getting a job with General Motors in Detroit for a monthly salary of $400, which was “a lot of money in those days,” he said.
Bob spent the 1950s at GM, but realized early on that his passion was computers, not cars. So, he took on a job with IBM in 1960 and three years later when they offered him a chance to transfer to the company’s San Jose office, he took it and moved his family to Saratoga upon his wife’s request that they move to a city with good schools. Because of his unique position at IBM where he had easy access to computers, Bob spent a year in the 1960s writing a textbook on programming that would eventually be sold internationally, including France, England, Germany and South America, and translated into several languages. After receiving a barrage of fan mail from students in South American countries written in Spanish, Bob was compelled to enroll in a Spanish class at West Valley College to understand and respond to the letters.
In the 1970s, he took on a job as director of software development at Memorex and then in the 1980s started his own company that focused on software development in database applications. He retired in 1995.
Up until 2008, he and his wife led a perfect life, Bob said. But that year Anne suffered a stroke that left the left side of her body paralyzed. Since then, she’s been bedridden at the couple’s home and has difficulty speaking without drooling. Thus, she prefers to speak only to her husband and caregiver. But they’re surviving this, too. Sometimes people will ask Bob why he’s chosen to take care of his wife.
“Because Anne was always the most important person in my life and I literally couldn’t do anything else,” he said. “It’s what I should be doing at this point and I’m happy to do it. I know if the roles were reversed, she’d take care of me.”
Bob recalls the activities he enjoyed with his wife, from sailing and skiing to traveling all over Europe. Everything they did, they did together, he said. Their living room wall is a testament to the good times the couple spent together, with one photo showing a smiling Anne on a boat in her younger days. Reminders of Anne are everywhere, from the wallpaper on Bob’s iPhone to the license plate on his favorite car, a yellow Porsche, which reads “Bob Anne.”
The car was an indulgence he allowed himself for looking after Anne, Bob said. When he’s not taking care of his wife, he enjoys reading books on his iPad mini. He takes pride in being a speed reader, reading up to 2,000 words per minute.
Today, eldest son Burt is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maine. Their second son, Bruce, is a professor of classics at the University of Texas and their third son, Jeff, lives in Oakland and works as a musician and teaches the history of music at various community colleges in the area. The couple also have two granddaughters in their 20s with another on the way.
The recipe for their long-lasting love is simple, Bob said. They met, they fell in love and they lived happily ever after. If there was ever a problem between them, they tried to solve it together. And they depended on each other for just about everything.
“We never dated anybody else, we never fell out love,” said Bob. “We were always each other’s best friend.”
