Claudia and Dwight Stoffel insist that their lives together as a couple have been pretty unremarkable. Even in this day when so often love doesn’t last, they claim their 50-year love story is still unremarkable.
To hear the couple tell me, even though it’s littered with little giggles and the loving interruptions of two people who have told the story many times before, their meeting was even fairly unremarkable.
After all, it’s not all that uncommon to make a fast friend your first semester in college and then to learn that she has a brother.
Which is how it all began for Claudia and Dwight.
“I met Dwight’s sister my first day at college because we were living on the same floor in our dorm,” she recalls.
Courtesy of their big freshman Vanderbilt University Class of 1968 name tags, Claudia learned that Sara was also from Cleveland and was also a nursing major.
“We truly became instant friends and a month later, we were walking to get our mail and she said, ‘You know I have a brother, right?’” she remembers.
Claudia and Dwight officially met when she traveled back home to spend a few days of the Christmas holiday break with Sara.
Their first date (of sorts) was a New Years Eve showing of Gone with the Wind, which I thought was pretty remarkable, but alas…no, the couple says.
“My first impression was that he was really nice, just a nice guy,” Claudia says. “I felt like I knew him already.”
“I thought she was very pretty,” Dwight recalls.
The couple was separated by some distance—Claudia in Nashville in school at Vanderbilt and Dwight in Indiana at Purdue University.
And when they went back to school for the spring semester, it seemed like that was going to be that with their budding romance.
There were a few other outings together, one to the Kentucky Derby (sounds remarkable, right?) but in the summer of 1969, Claudia just wasn’t feeling all Summer of Love for Dwight. She wanted to set the record straight, so she wrote him a letter saying that she loved him, but more like a brother.
A remarkable blow.
One that most relationships don’t come back from.
But then all of a sudden the couple had made a full trip around the sun since their first official meeting with the “Frankly My Dears” and they met up again, again during a trip home with Sara.
Only this time, Claudia took one look at Dwight and had a quite remarkable change of heart.
“I thought, ‘What was wrong with me?’”
“He was so wonderful, but I didn’t know what I could do after the letter I’d written him,” she says.
So, she always made sure to say hello when Sara was on the phone with Dwight. She added little P.S. notes to the letters between sister and brother.
And when it came time for summer, she found herself with Dwight again as the two roommates unpacked their cars from the move home. She was not letting him go this time without a fight.
“I wanted him to pay attention to me so I chased him all around the house,” she laughs. He laughs too.
“And he let me catch him. He turned right around and asked if I wanted to go out with him.”
Six weeks later, the couple was engaged.
One Saturday morning, the couple had gone out to pick out Claudia’s engagement ring. What a remarkable feeling it must have been, the excitement of young love between the two that had danced around the topic for two years now.
But when they returned to Claudia’s house to show it off, there was a message from Dwight’s mother.
“I called her back and she said, ‘I have an envelope here with an eagle on it,’” he recalls.
I have to admit, hearing Dwight tell this made my heart clinch. I’d been following along in this story, rooting for these two lovebirds to just get together finally. When I heard the words “draft notice” come from his mouth, I had only one thought:
What remarkably rotten luck!
But Claudia and Dwight know how this story ends, so they are still remarkably nonchalant about the setback. Yes, they were separated again. No, Dwight never had to go to Vietnam like so many others his age. Instead he added an extra year of duty and got assigned to the White House Communications Agency at Camp David.
Yes, Claudia and Dwight finally did get married, the day after she graduated from Vanderbilt the following year. And they lived in Maryland, Dwight working for the President of the United States and Claudia as a nurse at the National Institutes of Health. Which again, I thought was remarkable, but alas…
A year later, they’d moved back to Cleveland and begun their lives there. Their oldest son, Matt, was born. They struggled, like most young couples do. Claudia was working nights and her job was stressful. She also says she was a “spoiled brat”, which contributed to many of their difficulties.
Not long after is where, according to Claudia and Dwight, the story finally takes a turn for the remarkable.
The couple, neither of which had grown up deeply religious, found themselves on the receiving end of God’s divine grace.
“I got saved and then Dwight got saved,” Claudia says. “All of a sudden, there was something else in our life.”
“I cannot begin to describe the changes it made in our lives.”
Remarkably, says Claudia, God began putting some big pieces together for the path of their lives.
“The day I found out I was pregnant with our daughter Kristin, we got a phone call from a guy who sold real estate asking if we were thinking of selling our house?” she says.
They had toyed with the idea of moving. They said yes and signed the papers 10 days later.
“God took us literally to the exact places we needed to be, when we needed to be there, to place us in Paducah,” she says of the couple’s move in 1977.
And God, who’d paved the way for them to move their family to a new home, stayed by them when Kristin was born with numerous major health issues.
“We weren’t overwhelmed by it, we just said ‘Okay God, we know you are going to take care of it,’” Claudia recalls. “And he did. He performed miracle after miracle in Kristin’s life.”
While Dwight worked at what is now Arkema in Calvert City and Claudia worked as a nurse at Baptist Health, God kept their family growing. After Matt and Kristin came Patrick and David in quick succession. And the couple completed their family by adopting Tabitha.
Even as they worked and raised their five children, Dwight and Claudia held fast to one rule—one they’d learned not long after they’d accepted Jesus into their hearts.
“When we first got saved, we went to a marriage conference with people from our church and the man who did the conference said the one thing all married couples need to do is pray together in the morning,” she recalls.
“Dwight and I started that and we continue it to this day.”
“When the kids were little, we always had morning time for prayer. Sometimes it was just me asking God to take care of them and sometimes we would pray about tests or friendships or struggles.”
“That’s really what has held our family together.”
Remarkable.
Now, the parents of five are grandparents of 10 and great-grandparents of two. Claudia is recently retired from her job as a nursing professor at WKCTC and fills her time volunteering as a pre-school aide in her daughter’s preschool classroom and working when needed at Easter Seals. Dwight still works at Arkema.
They celebrated their 50th year together with a trip to Hawaii to see their oldest son Matt, who is in the Air Force, and a trip to their favorite island off the coast of Charleston. They are active members at rest Church in Paducah and love sharing fellowship with that congregation.
And they still follow God’s lead in their lives and in their marriage.
“Basically, whatever God sends for us to do, that’s what we are going to do,” Claudia says.
After all, He was the one who made their lives remarkable.
“We don’t have an exciting life—no real wow stories. Just that we were two people who were lost and it took Jesus to put us together,” she says.
“We’ve had tragedies in our lives and we’ve had struggles and we’ve had great times. Through it all, the one thing that has kept us together has been Jesus.”
“And here we are 50 years later.”
To that, Dwight has only one word.
“Amen.”
