Remarkable couple toast seven decades

Last Friday, Phil and Sue Virgin arrived at the Palace Hotel, holding hands, ready for their Valentine’s Day dinner date, and on their table was a stunning bouquet of seven red roses.

While Sue was wondering if Phil couldn’t count half-a-dozen, she read the card.

“Thanks for seven decades,” it said.

The loved-up couple last month celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and as they entered the 2020s, they entered their seventh decade together as a couple.

After meeting as teenagers on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the Lord Forrest Olympic Pool back in 1966, the duo quickly became inseparable. Marrying four years later on January 17, 1970, 17-year-old Sue and 18-year-old Phil said “I do” at St John’s Church on Maritana Street surrounded by their closest family and friends.

Since then they have had three children, Shane, Mandy and Toby, and become grandparents to nine.

More recently they became great-grandparents.

They’ve travelled around Australia, seen the world, lived for a brief stint in Bunbury and Melbourne, and settled back home among the red dirt.

“I can’t believe how fast it’s gone — we’ve done lots of things though,” Sue said. They remember their first meeting as if it were yesterday.

“I was from Boulder and Sue was from Kal,” Phil said.

“(My friends and I) used to ride our bikes down to the pool — a big group of us, we used to do bombies and terrorise the pool.

“Every time I went to get out of the pool, this girl was there.

“I’d go to the other side of the pool and this girl was there.

“I’d do a bombie off the tower, and this girl was there.”

“I was chasing him, I thought he was pretty hot at that time,” Sue laughed.

“He was a real show pony.”

When asked what the secret to a long marriage was, Sue said it was simple.

“I reckon we wanted the same things,” she said.

“We didn’t want to make millions of dollars, we wanted to just plod along, I suppose”.

“We always try to be open with each other,” Phil said.

“If you mess up you fess up, and that’s the best way to be open.”

When they got married, the couple lived with Phil’s father in Boulder to save up while Phil worked as an apprentice carpenter for Shepherdson’s on Forrest Street and Sue worked at a hairdresser called Veronica’s on the main drag.

Phil still remembers his boss slipping him an envelope with an extra $10 a week in addition to his $21.20 weekly paycheck to help support his new wife and baby while their second child was on the way in the early 1970s.

“I never used to go to the pub, all the others used to go to the pub after work but I’d go (and see Sue) and get my hair done,” Phil said.

“On the weekends they’d go to the pub but I’d ride my bike to Sue’s and in the summertime we’d put a rug on the lawn and we’d kiss and cuddle on the front lawn.”

You may recognise their faces as the cheery owners of Phil and Sue’s Tower News, which was at the current Just a Little Cafe site for 27 years before closing down in 2014.

The duo had many highlights working together at their newsagency between 1988 and 2014, renting out videos, delivering papers and, more memorably, selling a mysterious division one lotto ticket back in 2001.

“We were the ones that sold the ticket that was supposed to be lost,” Sue said.

“It was the one where the mayor was in the paper at the tip saying it belonged to the council if found there because it was council property,” Phil said.

Six months after the unclaimed ticket was sold, Phil and Sue were closing up the shop on a Sunday night when a man came in wanting a refill for his water bottles.

While they helped the man with the water, his mum, who was waiting in the passenger seat of the car, discovered a wad of old lotto tickets in the glovebox.

Phil recalls him sheepishly asking to get the tickets checked.

The next minute a siren was going off and he walked out $1.5 million dollars richer.

“People rang us from all over the world — Germany, Switzerland — people that had come to Kalgoorlie and they’d bought a lotto ticket and it might be their lotto ticket,” Phil said.

“My aunty had just passed away and we were in Perth to go to the funeral, the day before that the ticket was found and Channel Seven, Channel Nine were there with their TV cameras wanting an interview at the airport.”

Apart from work, Phil and Sue have just loved each other’s company for the past 50 years, and being together as much as they can.

“We like going to the movies, so there would be like a chick flick on and Sue will say, ‘I want to see this movie, you don’t have to come if you don’t want’,” Phil said.

“So I go and see the chick flicks with her and more often than not I’d actually enjoy those movies.

“I’m more into sci-fi, and she comes with me too.” Phil said some advice from an old couple soon after he married had stuck with him.

“He said, ‘You know you gotta work at it and it doesn’t just happen’, and I said, ‘Sue gives 50 per cent and I give 50 per cent’, to which he replied, ‘That’s your first mistake’,” Phil said.

“He said, ‘You must put in 100 per cent’, and ‘I said what about Sue?’ He said, ‘She needs to give 100 per cent’.

“So if Sue is not well or you have money problems or kids are up all night or whatever, then your 100 per cent cuts in — or if you’re stressed out or hurt yourself, then Sue’s 100 per cent cuts in.”