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Dave Sullivan
Northern News Services
 Amy and Joe Mercredi look through their wedding album. - Dave Sullivan/NNSL photo |
But it went something like this:
In 1969, 32-year-old Joe Mercredi had just quit a DIAND job. He was walking by a pay phone on Ottawa's Sparks Street mall when it rang. At the same time he noticed an attractive woman passing. When he couldn't understand the French-speaking stranger on the line he gestured toward the woman, saying "here, it's for you, I don't know anyone in Ottawa."
Amy was on her way to a bus stop after a day of teaching French. She never took the call but the rest, as they say, is history.
"I just kept walking to my bus stop. He walked beside me, gave me his coat and said here, it's raining, and we went for coffee."
They dated but soon went their own ways. Both are from small-town Saskatchewan, but opposite sides of the province.
Several months later Joe was in Edmonton, from where he tracked Amy down by phoning all the "Stangs" in Germaine, Sask. Soon after she packed her bags to join him in the city.
In a small ceremony they married Sept. 9, 1971, in St. Albert, just outside Edmonton. The decision to wed was made the previous evening.
The honeymoon?
A week-long buffalo hunt near Fort Smith. Chief Dan George was in their group.
"We wanted to do something different," says Joe. "It was fun," says Amy.
The key to a solid marriage, they say, is communication and keeping life fun and spontaneous.
"Like, I might not feel like cooking so I'll say let's go into the bush and make some tea," Amy said.
One sign of a solid marriage is surviving a test like moving to Fort Simpson in the mid-1970s, following promises of jobs on an impending pipeline.
No jobs materialized, and they spent a couple very cold winter months living in a tent.
One day Joe decided to start his own newspaper, the Mackenzie News.
"We ran it off on a Gestetner and typed on an Underwood with a "C" that kept sticking," Amy recalls.
The couple adopted two children and fostered 20 more. Over they years they've lived in several NWT communities, where Amy taught school. Two years ago they settled in Enterprise.
