Do you want to know the secret to a happy marriage? LifeBook author Edward Hughes, who celebrated 75 years of marriage to his beloved wife, Jo Ann, in 2022, certainly has some good advice …
Edward grew up in New Jersey without a mother after she died giving birth to him, and he was still a junior in high school when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1943. As he says, “I started out as a kid delivering newspapers on a bicycle … The war came, everybody had to go into service, and that changed my whole life.”
After basic training in Mississippi, Edward was sent to gunnery school in Texas. Among his classmates was Donald O’Connor, an actor who had appeared in Singin’ in the Rain. However, while O’Connor was sent around the country to do public relations for the Air Corps, Edward passed through gunnery school and served in the Air Police before being sent to Japan as part of the post-war occupation force. There, he was offered a field commission in the 1st Cavalry Division, but he turned it down, saying, “This was the first good move I ever made. Had I accepted it, I would have been the first guy in Korea.”
Before being sent to Japan, Edward was introduced to Jo Ann. He had tried to get friendly with her older sister, but she brushed him off and matched him with Jo Ann. He was 19 years of age and Jo Ann just 17 when they got engaged, and they married on his return from Japan in 1947.
Tough times after leaving the armed forces
Edward attended Georgetown University in Washington to major in foreign service, while also playing baseball professionally (and losing his wedding ring in the process!). After graduation, he returned to Ohio and bought his first house with Jo Anne. Their first daughter was born there in 1950, but life wasn’t easy. The family struggled during his six months of work as a debit agent – “a terrible job,” he says – before Edward received a letter from the Defence Department, calling him back to active duty.
“Hooray!” said Jo Ann on hearing the news. “We’re going to eat!”
Edward became a supply officer in a basic training squadron in Sampson, New York. He remembers that time as “the worst year and a half of my life” because he was given every rotten job imaginable. After signing up for an assignment as an observer–navigator in the back seat of an F-94, he grabbed the opportunity to undergo pilot training in North Carolina. It was while there that he was introduced to hunting, which became a lifelong passion, and his second daughter was born.
Edward and Jo Ann’s third child was just six months old when the family then had to hurriedly pack the car and head to Georgia for Edward’s rushed assignment to B-47s. In blizzard conditions, their car was involved in a multi-vehicle collision and wrecked, though all were uninjured, thankfully. They eventually made it to Savannah, where Edward spent five years on a select crew in the B-47 program before being posted to Little Rock Air Force Base for pilot upgrade training. He stayed there for a further five years.
Dodging the bullets in Vietnam
By the mid-1960s, Edward had become a major with 2,000 hours of flying time to his name. He was posted to McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, and flew C-130s before being sent to Vietnam to head up all the assignments in the country for Cam Ranh Bay. He was responsible for 105 flight crews and 33 airplanes, and “every day was an adventure.” He manoeuvred planes from landing strips before they could be blown up by the Viet Cong and dropped 30,000 pounds of rice on a runway while his plane was being shot at.
After Vietnam, Edward joined the Air Defense Command as the chief of operations for the 14th Missile Warning System. He was appointed to a similar role for the sea-launch Ballistic Missile Warning System in Laredo from 1972 until the base was closed three years later. He then retired.
A world-champion marksman
In his spare time, Edward joined the Armed Forces Skeet Association. In 1979, at the world championship in San Antonio, his team set the Group 2 12-gauge winning score of 1,230/1,250 – a record that still stands today.
He continued in the sport for many decades. In 2016, at the age of 89, he won the Texas Senior Veteran State Championship, while the following year he won the World Senior Veteran Championship in all five gauges. Two years later, he won two of the five gauges at the world championship as well as the Senior Veteran Championship at the Texas State Championship. He has continued shooting clays to this day.
After retiring from the armed forces, Edward bought a Hallmark store with Jo Ann and made a success of that venture. Once that was sold, he reflected on his visits to 109 countries during his Air Force career, and, together with Jo Ann, he returned to 90 of them. He also got into cooking and has prepared meals of venison sausage, tortillas and frijoles for as many as 250 people.
And his key to a long and happy marriage? Having been wed to Jo Ann for 76 years (at the time of writing his LifeBook), Edward confessed, “The key to a successful marriage is to be away half the time! I have been married for 76 years, and I was probably away for about 30 of them!”
Edward’s LifeBook, My Life, was completed in 2024.
Written by Stephen Pitts, LifeBook Memoirs editor
