Be kind, respect and forgive

His mother bought him a new pair of roller skates for Christmas that year, and her mother bought her a pair of roller skates for Christmas that year.

Bob and Barbara would both end up at the newly opened Bridgewater Skating Rink shortly after Christmas, but it wouldn’t be for a few more years of frequenting that establishment, until when she was a sophomore attending high school at Massena and he was a junior attending high school at Richland, that they would meet. Now, Bob and Barbara Queck have been married for 63 years.

Bob and Barbara Queck are the fourth and final couple to be featured in an Adair County Free Press story series in February on love stories.

It started from hello

Bob and a friend, who happened to have a driver’s license, drove to Bridgewater one night and Bob’s friend spotted Barbara and a friend skating.

“I had a good buddy who had an old Ford pickup with a four-on-the-floor, so he picked me up and we went to Bridgewater to roller skate. One of the evenings along in there, he knew Barbara, but he was a bit shy, so he said, ‘Bob, let’s take those girls home tonight. Would you go and talk to them?’ So, I skated up to them and talked to this other girl, whose name was Barbara as well,” Bob remembers.

The story goes that each of the boys took the girl with them, but the next time didn’t go as easily.

“This Barbara said ‘No, I don’t want to go home with him’,” Bob said. “I asked her, ‘Would you let me go with you?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I would do that.’”

Bob and Barbara were together for four years before they were married. After high school, Barbara moved to Des Moines to work and Bob followed suit. Bob asked Barbara to marry him on her birthday, which was Valentine’s Day 1955. They were married the following January 15 at Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Fontanelle.

“Bill got the other Barbara and I got this Barbara, and that’s how it all began,” Bob said. “I had an awful lot of respect for her. She just fit what I was looking for. We seemed to develop a lot in common, so the big day finally came. We’re like every other couple, we’ve had our times too, but we made it through and we’re very happy with our marriage, getting along, and so on.”

Moving home

After renting a third-story apartment in Des Moines in their first years of marriage for just $35 per month in the late 1950s, the Quecks moved to a farm north of Richland in Adair County where they lived for eight years. In 1965, they moved back to Bob’s home place and lived there until 2017.

“We haven’t moved around a whole lot,” Barbara said.

“I lived in that house for 72 years,” Bob added. “Ten years is all that I didn’t live there.”

In that house, the Quecks raised their family, which included four children. From youngest to oldest, they are Daniel, Roger, Nancy and Steve. From agricultural activities like raising livestock and participating in organizations like 4-H and FFA to taking part in Scouts, the Quecks were a busy family.

The Quecks reached a scary time early on in raising their children when their two oldest children were found to have heart murmurs.

“Our two oldest children had open heart surgery when they were 3 and 4 years old three days apart,” Barbara said. “We doctored still with a doctor in Massena, and he noticed Nancy had a heart murmur. We went to Creston, they ran some tests and determined she did have [a heart murmur]. A short time before we were going to go [to Iowa City with Nancy], we had Steve over to the doctor and he said he thought we should take Steve with us too because he has a heart murmur too.”

The Quecks traveled all the way to Iowa City for their two oldest children to be operated on. The prognosis was that if they weren’t operated on, they’d maybe live at least until they were teenagers. They were operated on and are living healthy lives today.

“We spent a lot of time there, even prior to their surgery, and when we would go out there for checkups, or even while they were still in the hospital, there were a lot of children there that couldn’t be helped. They were more or less waiting to die because they didn’t have the cure for some of the things they do now,” Barbara said. “We determined we were pretty fortunate they could be fixed.”

Mission Builders

Fast forward to 2000 and Bob and Barbara both retired from their jobs and had rented out their farm ground.

“We wanted to do something with the church, and the pastor we had at the time saw an ad for Mission Builders,” Bob said. “He told me he didn’t know anything about it but that we should check it out, so we did, and we were hooked.”

Mission Builders is an organization that stems from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, helping congregations, camps or other organizations within the ELCA to improve their facilities by sending mission workers to build those facilities. The Quecks say their first mission was to Quartsite, Arizona.

“Talk about faith — we knew we were going to Quartsite, Arizona but we didn’t know much about Mission Builders or how it was going to work,” Barbara said. “We got in our little 27-foot camper and away we went.”

The Quecks continued with Mission Builders until three years ago when Bob’s health forced them to retire.

“Mission Builders is a great group of people, wonderful to us. We have some very fond memories in that group as well,” Bob said. “Three years ago I had to retire because of my back. Construction is not an easy job, so I had to quit. I really hated to do that but it was necessary that we do that.”

Moving to town

Bob and Barb were already owners of an apartment at Summerset Estates in Fontanelle when their grandson, Paul, who is Steve’s son, approached them about wanting to move into their farmhouse when they moved to town. While giving away and selling numerous mementos of sentimental value was one of the hardest things they’ve done, the Quecks are thankful they’ve already worked through that process together.

“It’s quite an adjustment to live on a farm for that long [then move to town], but our thought is that it’s time,” Bob said. “We knew we had to be doing something because of our age, so we had looked at this place two years prior knowing that someday [we’d want it]. Our feeling is that the opportunity to hand it over to the next generation came and it was something we needed to do and we were ready. It’s a change, it’s different. For me, I think the tough moment was getting rid of all the stuff we needed to get rid of in order to downsize. Lots of those things we sold or gave away had a lot of memories. For me, it was hard to say it’s gotta go.”

Helping hands

Now, in retirement living in town, two words you could use to describe the Quecks is that they’re the “helping hands” of their community. Bob, who still has his wood shop out on the farm, is always willing to be the “handy man,” fixing whatever his neighbors need fixed. He’s repaired several of the chairs in the Summerset Estates commons area and one of his biggest projects to date, which he had help on from neighbors in the Richland area, is building the tables that are in Kramer’s Cafe in Orient.

Both Bob and Barbara are known as friends to many. They’ll help friends from their church or community get to doctor’s appointments in the city, and so forth. Every once and while, they relive their favorite memory in the commons area — the days when neighbors would still gather and play cards together.

“We love to help others that need it,” Bob said. “Barbara’s been a caregiver for years for her aunt Aida. There have been other people we’ve tried to help out. To us, there’s a lot of gratification in doing that sort of thing. It’s something we can do. Especially the church, we’ve taken them to eye doctors, for hearing aids, for chemo treatment and that type of thing.”

“He’s become kind of the maintenance man here because there aren’t a lot of men in this building,” Barbara said proudly.

On the same page

How have the Quecks stayed on the same page for 63 years? They admit it hasn’t always been easy, as their story testifies. They say having daily time to reflect on themselves and their Christian faith is important. It gives them the ability and time to talk things through.

“There have been some times we got a little upset with one another but we always seemed to make it through those times,” Barbara said.

“A lot of it is being kind to one another. Yep, there have been a few days we didn’t say a lot to each other, but it’s forgiveness,” Bob said. “It takes a lot of forgiveness and a lot of growing up. We’re able to sit and talk things through.”