COLUMBUS, Ind. — It’s been almost 70 years and Ralph and Mary Jo Risley are still in love.

The couple will celebrate their 70th anniversary on April 9 in Columbus, but it all started in Daviess County.

“I wrote her a note in school and got in trouble,” Ralph said. He thinks the note incident happened in the eighth grade at Plainville, where both he and Mary Jo Colvert were students. Six years later the two would become one when they exchanged vows in the Plainville Christian Church parsonage on Easter Sunday.

“The pastor got $80 a month back then, and I gave him $10 so he was happy to get it,” Ralph chuckled.

The two had grown up in Daviess County and after they married Ralph worked on the levy before taking a job at NSWC Crane. Later he would go back to farming fulltime.

The couple had a full life caring for their only child Brenda Gayle. Mary Jo was the girls 4-H leader in Steele Township for 13 years and the couple enjoyed watching their daughter grow up and eventually marry.

While Daviess County was home, the Risleys also enjoyed traveling and have actually gone around the world. Ralph said they had welcomed a foreign exchange student from India into their home through 4-H and jumped at the chance when his family invited them to visit him on their coffee plantation in India.

“We flew to Bangkok and then to India,” Ralph said. “Then we flew home. So we’ve actually been around the world.”

After retirement, Ralph and Mary Jo moved to Florida in 1984 for 14 years. They went down to visit and ended up having a house built.

“Sometimes I miss Florida but only in the winter,” Ralph said.

The couple moved to Columbus 11 years ago to be closer to family including their granddaughter Kathy Floyd of Bloomington, and her twin daughters. They also have a grandson Kurk Sylvester, who has two sons. Now great-great-grandchildren have been added to the family.

“They’re all pretty nice little kids,” Ralph said about his growing family.

Granddaughter Kathy is owner of Beautiful Creations in Bloomington a boutique that caters to cancer sufferers. She said her grandmother Mary Jo, a cancer survivor, was the inspiration for the business. Floyd and her mother, Brenda Sylvester, started the business 22 years ago and ran it together until Brenda’s death in 2004.

“My mother was also a cancer survivor,” Floyd said. “She was diagnosed with cancer at age 36 and was only given a few months to live.”

Fortunately, Brenda was included in an experimental program at the IU Medical Center and the new drug worked, allowing her another 20-plus years with her family, husband Joseph, daughter, son, grandchildren and especially her parents.