Mike and Mary Ruth Sparks celebrate 50th anniversary

Mike and Mary Ruth (Luna, Kahl) Sparks will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary June 6 with a small group of family and friends at their home in Raymore, south of Kansas City. Their anniversary is June 10, but some of their friends and family couldn’t come during the middle of the week. 

Mary Ruth grew up in Gainesville, the daughter of M.J. and Stella Martin Luna. She has deep roots in Ozark County and is a descendant of pioneer settlers Paton and Nancy Graham Keesee, and Elisha and Eliza Luna. She graduated from Gainesville High School in 1960 and eventually earned a Ph.D. in education from Kansas State University in Manhattan. She retired in 1998 after serving as head of the Journalism Department at Texas Woman's University in Denton.

Mike grew up in Abilene, Texas, the son of Elmer and Geneva Sylvester Sparks. In 1991, he retired as a lieutenant colonel after 22 years of combined active and reserve duty with the Army. He holds a bachelor's degree in education and master's degrees in business, and in civilian life, he held management positions with GTE telephone operations and Sprint. 

After five decades of marriage, Mike and Mary Ruth marvel at how close they came to not meeting at all. 

On Feb. 27, 1976, Mary Ruth attended a singles party in Manhattan, Kansas, where she was working on a Ph.D. at K State. Mike, then an Army officer posted at nearby Fort Riley, Kansas, (and also working on a master's degree at K State) attended a birthday party for a friend's daughter. An Army friend had previously invited Mike to the singles party. After the birthday party, Mike took a swing through the parking lot where the singles party was being held but didn’t see his friend’s car, so he was ready to go home. He took one more look back, saw his friend's little red Triumph and decided to go to the party. 

Mike and Mary Ruth struck up a conversation at the singles party, sparking a mutual attraction that led to their getting married a little more than three months later. They joke that their courtship was short because Mike was renting a duplex in Manhattan, and his lease was coming due. He proposed to Mary Ruth, and after their small wedding moved into the house where she lived with her two children.

They were married June 10, 1976, in Manhattan. 

Both Mike and Mary Ruth had been married before. Their blended family includes three children, John Kahl and wife Kaki of Leawood, Kansas; Dr. Janet Kay Kahl Willhaus and husband Phil Woodford of Gainesville; and Lauren Sparks of Frisco, Texas; and seven grandchildren. 

As they near their 50th anniversary, Mike and Mary Ruth laugh, thinking that, since they had known each other such a short time before they married, their family and friends probably thought the marriage wouldn’t last long.