NEWS

Interracial Delaware couple ignores critics for nearly 50 years

Margie Fishman
The News Journal

She grew up in the northwest corner of Missouri, a blip on the map, where you could afford to be color blind because the only "person of color" was an elderly black woman who would slip into church and make a hasty exit before the benediction.

Sara and Pat Aldrich of Lewes. They got married the day after the Supreme Court legalized mixed-race marriages.

He grew up near prestigious Yale University, the son of domestics who saw his parents three times (in a good week), and was one of three black kids in his high school graduating class, always on the social periphery.

They might never have met, though they nearly crossed paths several times during their young adult years. Even if they had met then, strident objections against mixing races would've filled the background, contaminating their relationship before it had a chance to blossom.

But Sara Beth Kurtz, a shy, determined dancer, and Vince "Pat" Collier Aldrich Jr., a medical records specialist who listened to his gut and to the occasional opera, did meet in 1965 in a sleepy German village — courtesy of the United States military.

Delaware cities below national average in LGBT rights

'Loving' trailer focuses on the power of love

The couple wed in Basel, Switzerland, on June 13, 1967, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in 16 states, including Delaware.

The couple behind that landmark case, Richard and Mildred Loving, are the focus of a new film that's generating Oscar buzz. The movie chronicles a quiet romance-turned-hugely-controversial-legal-battle after a white bricklayer and a woman of African American and Native American descent got married in Washington, D.C., in 1958. Shortly after settling in their home state of Virginia, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in jail for violating that state's ban on interracial marriage.

They agreed not to return to Virginia for 25 years in exchange for a suspended sentence. In his opinion, the trial judge noted that "almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents" for a reason.

The Supreme Court later invalidated that justification and many others used to prohibit mixed-race unions at the time, enabling the Lovings to raise a family in Virginia after nine years in exile. In the years since, the rate of interracial marriage has increased steadily and states across the nation, including Delaware, have commemorated the anniversary of Loving v. Virginia with "Loving Day" celebrations.

A photo of Sara and Pat Aldrich of Lewes with their children Stacie and Jason while on vacation in Alaska.

An estimated 15 percent of all new marriages in the U.S. in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity, more than double the share in 1980, according to census data. Marriages between blacks and whites are the fourth most frequent group among interracial heterosexual couples. In Delaware, more than 17,000 mixed-race couples wed in 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Today, the Aldriches live in a modest apartment in a 55-and-over community in southern Delaware, where a grandfather clock chimes on the quarter-hour and an overweight tortoiseshell cat lolls on the kitchen table.

Sara has close-cropped white hair, a ruddy complexion and wears a floral sweatshirt on this recent afternoon. She gushes when asked to describe her husband, a patient Renaissance man. Pat, a St. Patrick's Day baby with bushy eyebrows and a lampshade mustache, tolerates her compliments with bashful smiles.

"Pat sees the big picture," Sara says. “I fill in the details. Between the two of us, we cover the entire surface of the world."

With the recent release of "Loving," Sara thought it an opportune time to release her self-published memoir, "It's Your Problem, Not Mine," which traces the couple's history together and apart ending with Sara's family finally accepting Pat in the 1970s. The title sums up the Aldriches' attitude all along, underpinning their successful marriage.

The Lovings were "the ones that paved the way for us," says Sara, 76. "The strength of our love has not dimmed."

"We ignored a lot," admits practical Pat, now 80.  "We didn't invite acrimony."

Acrimony found them anyway. Not in the form of violent outbursts, but in the occasional scowl or invitation never sent.

Sara doesn't understand prejudice. When she closes her eyes, her husband's soothing voice isn't white or black; it's home.

Pat takes a more academic approach. By definition, prejudice is pre-judgment without examination, he says. Therefore, once a person examines a situation and weighs the relevant facts, he or she can make a rational judgment.

"Not many people will do that, Sara interjects."They have ideas without knowing."

 "He doesn't feel any differently"

The first time Sara touched, or, frankly, said anything to, a black man was at a folk dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Then a graduate student studying and teaching dance, Sara zeroed in on the best dancer in the room: Julius from Chicago.

As they danced, palms touching, Sara marveled: "He doesn't feel any differently."

A photo of Sara and Pat Aldrich of Lewes. They got married the day after the Supreme Court legalized mixed-race marriages.

She realizes how hopelessly out of touch that sounds today, eight years after the nation elected its first black president.

But Sara grew up in Oregon, Missouri, where no one seemed bothered by a third-grade play titled "Cotton Pickin' Days," featuring youngsters performing in blackface.

Pat also was raised in a lily-white community. The first time he encountered "White" and "Colored" restrooms was as an undergraduate at West Virginia State, a historically black college that had a sizable white commuter population. He was alarmed but not shaken.

Soon after, as an ROTC cadet training in Kentucky in the late 1950s, Pat was refused a meal at a restaurant.

Later, he joined a group of his classmates for a sit-in at a lunch counter in Charleston. There they sat, deflecting nasty comments from opening to closing.

Finally, an elderly white woman asked to speak to the manager.

"She couldn't understand why we couldn't be fed," Pat remembered.

Pat quickly abandoned civil disobedience when a professor informed him that an arrest could jeopardize his commission as an officer.

He ended up leaving college between his junior and senior years because he could no longer afford the tuition.

For a time, he lived in Harlem, where he was surrounded by people who looked like him and treated one another like family.

To avoid being called to Vietnam, he voluntarily enlisted as a medical records specialist in the Army and was sent to Fort Leavenworth, located about 30 miles from Sara's hometown.

Black and white soldiers collaborated on base; off-base, they drank separately.

One time, Pat joined a group of nine white soldiers at a bar in Texas. The owner shook his head. Pat's buddies argued passionately.

"At ease," Pat recalled saying. "We're out of here."

An altercation was useless, he reasoned. "You're in this life to make yourself happy."

In early 1965, Pat was sent to Neubrucke, Germany, at his request. He was chasing after a woman.

Sara was not that woman. She didn't arrive until several months later as a club director with the Special Services Division.

Her first day on the job, the midwesterner with the stylish bob and specs met two sergeants at the service club.

The second one was Pat, who worked in the photo lab. Sara took in his high cheek bones, smooth skin a cross "between milk and dark chocolate" and confident posture.

"I'm going to have to catch myself with that man," she confided in a friend.

The pursuit followed, which Sara details in her book.

Sara asked Pat for camera-buying advice and to teach her to play pool. She wrangled an invitation to accompany Pat and his friend on a weekend pass to Paris.

No real romance there. At an underground nightclub, Sara accidentally dumped a drink on Pat's new suit.

Still, they talked for five hours on the train ride home. By the end of the trip, Pat was intrigued and Sara was falling in love.

Softening the blow

Within a week, they shared a gentle kiss in the darkroom. Over their 15-month courtship, the couple's friends seemed indifferent. This was Germany and a lot of black G.I.s were dating white women. Meanwhile, back at home, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act and Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase, "Black Power."

Once the couple got engaged, Sara immediately wrote to her father. Willard, a rural mail carrier, had heard of Pat in dozens of letters, but didn't know what he looked like.

A photo of Sara Aldrich of Lewes on the day of her wedding being walked down the aisle.

In announcing her engagement, Sara made clear that Pat was a "negro," who was "part white on his mother's side and possibly had American Indian blood on his father's side." (That was done to "soften the blow," she said in a recent interview).

It didn't have the desired effect. Sara's older brother, Robert, refused to talk to her for a year. "I feel you have made a mistake and I don't want to be any part of the mistake," he wrote in a terse letter.

"Communication received and noted," came Sara's reply. "Auf Wiedersehen."

Sara's father responded within a month of the couple's announcement. A strict German who seldom betrayed his emotions, Willard wrote that while he considered the negro "a human being and a child of God the same as myself," he was deeply concerned about his daughter's welfare and happiness. He urged her to come home and think things through.

"I must have read his letter two or three times, trying to find a sentence that I could take as his approval," Sara wrote in her book. Not long after, Willard reconciled with his daughter.

To add to the confusion, Sara's godfather, the Presbyterian minister who baptized her, wrote her two letters. In the first one, he told her he wanted to hug her and Pat and transport them to "some better culture." The second letter, totaling three pages single-spaced, listed all the reasons why their marriage was doomed — their children would belong to neither race; they would confront prejudice even in urban areas; this "problem" had serious repercussions for the family.

Pat's blood pressure spiked. Sara couldn't sleep.

"My theory is anyone who got to know him would like him," she remembers.

Back at home, race riots swept the country in the summer of 1967. Sara and Pat were barred by law from marrying in Sara's hometown. So they decided to get married abroad.

On June 13, 1967, Sara and Pat had their civil ceremony in Switzerland, where the marriage fee was only $10. After a two-day honeymoon, they returned to Germany and got wind of the Loving verdict and felt a little vindicated.

They held a ceremony in the chapel of the German military hospital where they were first stationed. Sara wore a $25 lace wedding gown and the couple bribed vendors to arrange flowers and hairstyles on what was supposed to be a German holiday.

Pat's mother, who had supported the couple from the beginning, attended. (His father had died by then, as had Sara's mother). Sara's father declined, explaining that he had to work.

In January of 1968, three months before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the couple returned to the United States and settled in New York.

In the years that followed, Sara worked as a recreation therapist in a nursing home. Pat worked as a computer systems analyst, tinkering with machines that consumed entire rooms.

In 1976, Sara's brother, Robert, called unexpectedly. He told Pat he was sorry for pre-judging him. He didn't apologize to Sara. (Later, Robert became engaged to a black woman).

The year 1976 is where Sara's book ends. "I didn't think our story from that point on was interesting," she explained. "Our lives took on the same color of every other married couple that had children."

The couple moved to a townhome in a white, Polish neighborhood in upstate New York, where they joined the neighborhood Welcome Wagon but were never invited back for some reason.

They paid to send their oldest, Jason, to an integrated school outside their district. When their daughter, Stacie, told her high school friends she was dating a black man, one smashed a black and white jellybean together and threw it at her.

A photo of Sara Aldrich of Lewes on her wedding day.

In a more disturbing incident, a black teen, who lived down the street from the family, threatened to kill Stacie without explanation. He often stood at the end of the Aldriches' driveway, taunting them with a baseball bat. Nothing came of it.

The first time the family ventured south was in the mid-1990s to drop Jason off at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Later, Pat and Sara visited their daughter in Florida, overcoming fears of staying overnight in Georgia. Eventually, they retired in Delaware.

Now 45 and 39, both Aldrich children identify as black. Jason, an attorney, is married to a Filipino woman. Stacie, a university manager, has a 7-year-old daughter who has Honduran, German, Irish and African roots.

Inspired by a writing seminar, Sara started her book two years ago, unfolding hundreds of letters she had tucked away in old shoeboxes.

She found a few from a beloved aunt, who wrote to Sara's father after hearing of the couple's engagement.

"What baffles me most is how the mixed friendship started," one letter began. "There had to be something in her social life that brought about this Joan of Arc crusade."

In the end, Sara says, she and Pat weren't community outcasts and their children didn't have the existential crises that her family had predicted.

These days, Pat's biggest fight is against multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. The couple, who voted for Donald Trump, are convinced that race relations have deteriorated over the past two decades.

Pat, a fan of author/philosopher Ayn Rand, blames all the "noise."

"If people would stop yelling at each other and listen," he continues. "For crying out loud, take a look at the advancements we've made."

Subtle racial hostilities are easy to disregard, adds Sara. She feels fortunate that the couple never experienced any outright attacks, acknowledging that they probably benefited from geography and changing racial norms.

In 1990, Sara and Pat were among 1.3 million interracial couples in the country. Today, there are 4.8 million.

And, despite their superficial differences and divergent backgrounds, they still win handily in the "Not So Newlywed Game."

Contact Margie Fishman at 302-324-2882, on Twitter @MargieTrende or mfishman@delawareonline.com.