The bride wore a long flowing veil. The groom looked dashing in a white coat and black bow tie. The wedding vows the young college graduates exchanged at Rhinebeck’s Third Lutheran Church on Livingston Street were full of promise. The year was 1956.
This June, Richard and Ann Siebold, two Rhinebeck natives with deep roots in the community, celebrated 70 years of marriage.
The couple, who today live in Pittsboro, N.C., held a Sunday lunch in Chapel Hill surrounded by family to mark the occasion.
Richard Siebold, 93, has a message for young couples who are getting married today: “Support each other even when things get tough and be honest with each other. If you agree to something with a ‘Yes, dear,’ make sure you mean it and you follow through on that commitment.”
Both Richard and Ann were born in Rhinebeck during the Great Depression.
“Rhinebeck was a great place to grow up,” said Ann, who was born in 1935 and raised on a local farm with her parents and grandparents. “I had good friends, a great public school system, and wonderful school teachers and a piano teacher.”
There was plenty to do for a kid, even if they didn’t have much money. “I had lots of room to explore,” recalls Ann. “Even though I grew up during the Depression, I never felt poor.”
Richard, who was born in 1933, recalled the Hudson River being a big focus of his childhood activities. “My friends and I would go down to the Rhinecliff train station to help carry luggage and bags for elderly ladies from the train station to the dock so they could catch the ferry across,” he said.
He would also spend time in the basement of the Morton Library, which offered games for kids, like shuffleboard and ping pong. Having a place to hang out, “certainly helped to keep me out of getting into trouble,” he said.
They both graduated from Rhinebeck High School. Richard has fond memories of the school’s shop teacher, Horace Baker. “Mr. Baker believed there should be more discipline in kids’ lives — very formative for me since my own father died when I was around 12 years old,” he said.
Richard and Ann first met as children. In his senior year of high school, Richard asked Ann on a date, according to their daughter, Carin McCowan. The two went out to the movies, said McCowan.
Richard went on to attend Union College in Schenectady, where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering. Ann, meanwhile, attended Ithaca College and earned a B.S. in Music Education with a minor in literature. While in school, Ann played the viola in the symphony orchestra and was part of a traveling choir.
The two were wed the summer after Ann graduated from Ithaca College.
After college, Richard served in the U.S. Air Force. He was stationed in Texas, Florida, and Maine. In 1959, they moved to Poughkeepsie for Richard’s job as an engineer with IBM. Richard and Ann’s three children, Mark, Carin, and Dan, were all born during this period.
In 1967, with Richard still employed at IBM, the family moved to Rhinebeck, where Mark, Carin, and Dan attended school.
Ann served as the choir director at Third Lutheran Church in Rhinebeck for 16 years. She also sang as a mezzo soprano in the Hudson Valley Opera Association and performed throughout the Hudson Valley. She taught voice lessons privately to students at their home in Rhinebeck. Richard also served on the Board of Directors at Northern Dutchess Hospital.
In 1982, Richard and Ann relocated to Raleigh, N.C., when IBM moved its display terminal division to North Carolina. By that time, their three children had all graduated and left Rhinebeck.
Today, Mark and his wife, Alison, live in Cornelius, N.C.; Carin and her husband, Glenn, live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Dan, and his wife, Kathleen, live in Rhinebeck.
Ann and Richard have six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren—and a third great-grandchild on the way. At the lunch celebrating 70 years of marriage, the couple was presented with a photo book signed by their many progeny.