Henry and Mattie Hines live in the same high-rise apartment complex on East 33rd Street that they moved into four months after they got married in 1955.
From a well-appointed living room filled with large picture windows, you can see Hartzell Memorial United Methodist Church on King Drive, where they attend Sunday services. Down the street is the salon where Henry Hines still drives his wife every Thursday to get her hair done. Every Friday, he takes her to Macy’s for a manicure and pedicure.
When the couple were introduced by friends in 1954, he was a devout bachelor and she was a devout bachelorette. They both were older, had never been married and never thought they would build a life together that has been anything but routine.
Henry Hines, who turns 96 on Saturday, is fit and trim and still walks with his back straight. Mattie Hines, 88, is petite and soft-spoken. On the day I visited them, she wore a magenta jogging suit. The Hineses admit they have no secret to their longevity in life or love. Just a story:
“We were set up,”
Henry said
,
laughing. “I was 40 years old, and I enjoyed playing the field. A friend said, ‘I know a nice young lady. You should meet her.’ They thought we’d be good together.”
“I was 32,”
Mattie said
. “Back then, that was old. I never thought I’d get married.”
“I guess the moral is you can find love late in life,” he said.
“I was playing the field just like he was,” she said. “The other fellows just weren’t up to par. But Henry, he reminded me of my father. He was steady and nice. He’s still a beautiful person. The others were OK, good for going out to the clubs. But nobody was like Henry.”
“The women I had dated were a bit older,” he said, “and I wasn’t thinking about marrying any of them.”
“Don’t say that,”
Mattie
said.
“It’s true,” he said. “But then Matt and I met, and she was the first woman I’d dated who was much younger. We went to dinner and to a movie and hit it off. She was smart. We could talk about anything.”
“And laugh,” she said. “He made me laugh.”
“I still do,” he said. “And smile too.”
“He still does,” she said, smiling.
When Henry met Mattie, she was working for the Chicago Housing Authority, back when the promise of public housing loomed large. Henry, a World War II Army veteran, was “running on the road,” which meant working for New York Central Railroad managing the wait staff, traveling between Chicago and New York. He had grown tired of working for the Illinois Central Railroad, on a line that traveled between Chicago and the Jim Crow South.
But the weekends were for relaxing, often at the famed Club DeLisa on the South Side, where the couple wined, dined and danced.
“You went there to kind of blow off steam,”
Henry said
. “I would take her to see the shows, and you could get a table with some friends and just enjoy one another’s company.”
“I realized he had an automobile that wasn’t doing anything while he was on the road,”
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Mattie said
. “Going to the clubs was nice on the weekends, but I didn’t have any transportation during the week.”
“Matt wanted to borrow my car,” he said. “It was a 1954 Chevrolet Impala. My friends said, ‘You mean you let a woman have your car?’ Only Matt. Nobody else. And then a few months later, I proposed. I said to her, ‘Aren’t you tired of sleeping alone?'”
“Henry,” Mattie
said, rolling her eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t say that.”
“We got married on June 4, 1955,” he said. “She rushed me right into it. She was afraid I might change my mind.”
“We married at Graham Taylor Chapel
in Hyde Park,” she said.
“A few years ago, we turned to each other and realized it’s been half a century that we’ve been married,” he said. “It sure doesn’t feel like it.”
“It certainly doesn’t,” she agreed. “Our friends joke it’s because we never had children.”
“We have beautiful nieces and nephews,”
Henry said
.
“No, it doesn’t feel like 55 years,” she said. “If it did, then I suppose maybe we wouldn’t have made it this long.”
You can stand on the balcony off the Hines’ living room and see much has changed around them. There’s a vacant expanse where the beleaguered Ida B. Wells housing developments once stood four blocks to the south. Stores in the nearby shopping mall have turned over many times. Dear family members and friends have passed on.
But in the evening, as the sun begins to paint the view outside their window, he still brings her a drink. They sit side by side on their white living room sectional amid the photos of their many cruises and the artwork they’ve amassed over a lifetime together.
“You look at the statistics today, and it seems some people don’t stay married 55 minutes, let alone 55 years,”
Henry
said. “Maybe it’s that I used to run on the road and absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“But, Henry,”
Mattie said
,
“
you’ve been retired since 1980 and I’ve been retired since 1988 and we’ve been together ever since. We enjoy each other.”
“We really do,” he said. “We’ve never had major arguments. We disagree sometimes. But we’ve never been too set in any particular way.”
“When we go out, you see one, you see the other,” she said. “We’re always together. At home, we watch movies or we go to our separate rooms, but we always come back together. We enjoy each other.”
“We really do,” he said.
“We’ve been lucky in that we’ve had good health,” she said. “We don’t do much to celebrate holidays because at our age every day is Christmas. Every day is a birthday.”
“Every day is Valentine’s Day,” he said.