WNIN’s Steve Burger went to Newburgh in search of an unconventional love story in honor of Valentine's Day. He met up with a retired banker whose passion is focused on a four and a half by ten foot miniature landscape of Montana.
I thought I had this assignment nailed. I had heard about a Newburgh retiree who, for the past 20 years, has painstakingly constructed a HO-scale model train layout in his garage, that includes mountains, tunnels, a river, bears, a coal mine, a grain elevator, and by his own count, at least 480 trees, made and placed by hand. Surely, that qualifies, if not as an obsession, at least as a labor of love.
Rodney Crick, the President & CEO of the Flathead Valley and Western model railroad says he started building the layout in 1995, and first ran trains on it a year later. He retired about a year ago from Old National Bank in Evansville.
The location of the fictional railroad is east-central Montana, which Crick admits he has never actually seen. Instead, he studied images and researched soil types, foliage and geography of the area in building the layout.
I thought that surely Crick's passion for model railroading must cause some problems at home. So I asked his wife Anita, if she ever feels like she's sharing him with his trains. "Sure, but it gives him so much pleasure that I don't mind, " says Anita. She added that they are planning their 50th wedding anniversary celebration this year.
My theory of Crick's railroad as an unconventional love story started to crumble. His passion hasn't caused any problems at home, he had a long and successful career in business and lots of friends.
Then, an idea came to me. By now, you’ve heard the statistics on marriage and divorce in America. According to the National Health Statistics Report, 50% of all first marriages for women end in divorce, 30% for men, and now, perhaps because of that, 68% of women cohabit before their first marriage.
So the unconventional love story I sought in Newburgh, wasn’t about trains at all. It was two people, sticking by each other, supporting each other through thick and thin for half a century.
