Being old friends the secret to long marriage

Being old friends the secret to long marriage

Jill and Barry Taylor of Levin are planning “just a small lunch with close friends” on May 7 to celebrate 65 years of marriage.

“Our families all live in or near Auckland, so it is too hard for them all to come down,” says Barry, now 87.

Jill was 16 and Barry 17 when they met. They married aged 21 and 22 at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Auckland’s Symonds Street.

After 65 years of marriage and some serious globetrotting, the pair say they believe the secret to their success is “being friends long before marriage”.

Jill, 86, has worked throughout her marriage as a milliner (hat maker), stopping work completely only recently due to the physicality of the job.

She had her own business called Hello Dollies, counting some Hollywood celebrities among her clients.

While in the United States with Barry’s job from 1982 to 1996, she found work in Warner Brothers’ costume department, making hats of course.

“That department was huge . . . as big as the whole of Milne & Choyce,” she says, referring to the old Auckland department store.

Jill also taught millinery and hat making at a US university.

The couple could have stayed indefinitely, but the pull towards family won after 14 years in the US.

“Warner Brothers wanted me to start work refurbishing the hats they had in storage, but it was time to go home.”

Her hats have appeared in several movies such as Funny Girl and Maverick.

She also made hats for Grammy Award ceremonies as well as the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1984 LA Olympics, and at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. On one occasion, she made hats for the wedding party of a Paramount Studios vice-president.

“Hat making is physical work and involves a lot of hand pulling, which is why I recently had to give up.”

Jill and Barry met in the early 1950s while both were working as apprentices on Auckland’s Parnell Rise. Barry was an engineering apprentice with B Johnson and Sons near Carlaw Park, and Jill was an apprentice milliner at Milne & Choyce, first in Queen Street and later at Parnell Rise.

Barry had to give up his engineering apprenticeship due to hearing problems resulting from catching measles a few times.

“I went into office equipment and carpooled to work with a few friends, some of whom who worked at the Auckland Star, and that resulted in a newspaper job for me,” he says.“I was the first 8 O’Clock Sports national sales rep for a few years and regularly travelled all over New Zealand.”

He also worked for Woman’s Weekly and eventually became assistant manager at the Wellington office of NZ Newspapers.

“I was then approached by the Reader’s Digest to start the first NZ edition and worked for them for 14 years.”

That brought the couple back to Auckland.

A chance trip with friends to the Bay of Islands resulted in them buying a property in Paihia.

He worked for the Waitangi Golf Club for nearly two years, handled marketing for the Bay of Islands deep sea fishing charter fleet.

He helped set up a sport fishing association to attract American recreational sport fishers to New Zealand

Next thing they found themselves in Burbank, California, for that job.

“We were only going for two years but stayed 14,” Barry says. “We could have stayed longer but in the end we decided to come back as we missed our family too much.

“We’ve seen a lot of the US over those years and have probably been to places few Kiwis have been.”

They returned to Auckland in 1996, but decided it had changed too much for them to put down roots, so they ventured south to Lower Hutt, Waikanae, and Levin in 2005 when one of their sons began a business in the town.

The couple have two sons, three grandchildren and three great grandchildren.