A schoolteacher, a widower, and eighteen hundred jars a winter

Delbert had been a widower, living at Metropolis, Nevada for several years after his first wife Eva McAbee died. He came north to North Powder to help after an injury in the family, and that is how he came to be there.

Ophelia was teaching at Clover Creek school, and part of her salary was paid as room and board — at the McCanse place. They agreed to marry the following summer, met at Idaho Falls, and married on her return from visiting her aunt in Oklahoma, on 22 August 1925. Her father objected to losing his baby daughter to "that old man"; Delbert was eighteen years her senior.

He had wanted to be a doctor. Circumstances dictated that he use money borrowed from his grandmother's sister to buy land and farm with his father instead. He hunted venison and elk, days at a time in the mountains with very little equipment. As a young man he could ride any horse no matter how wild.

What their daughter remembered of the Depression years was the work. Clothes washed on a board, water heated in a boiler on a wood stove and drawn by hand from a well into five-gallon creamery cans. All the girls' dresses made on a treadle machine. Bread every other day. As many as eighteen hundred jars canned to see them through a winter. No electricity — homework done around an Aladdin lamp.

Toward the end of her life Ophelia told one of her daughters that she had had what very few women had: a husband who told her every day of their married life that he loved her.