TEXT/PHOTO BY DUKE WENZEL

JIM AND BELLE Hinrichs are pictured in their home last week. Jim turned 95 last February while Belle will turn 95 this August. The couple will celebrate their 71st wedding anniversary on June 7, 2010.

Belle and Jim Hinrichs have been married 71 years come June 7, 2010. A record not many reach, but Jim and Belle’s love affair goes back even further than that. They met and started dating when they were young teenagers.

Jim went to a basketball game with a group of friends in Gann Valley in 1928. Belle attended the same game with another group. It was most likely love at first sight as the young couple left the basketball game together. They would date for almost the next decade of the 1930s before marrying on June 7, 1939.

As the two teenagers grew to adulthood, the “dirty thirties” just weren’t a good time to get married and go out on their own so Jim and Belle continued to date. They knew times would get better as Belle’s family, the Workman’s and Hinrichs’ families struggled through the Great Depression.

Jim and Belle Hinrichs are pictured around 1938 or 1939 just before they were married. The couple had been courting for most of the “Dirty Thirties” decade.

By 1939, the year they would both turn 24, things started to look better and the couple, “tied the knot” as they called it back then.

Before long, the couple had a place of their own and spent the next four decades or so running a successful farming operation and raising their five children: Myron, Myrna,