St Joseph, Mo. ? John Buhman gave three days’ wages for a boxed supper. Best deal he ever got.

Sure, he was hungry. A man works up an appetite picking corn by hand, 100 bushels a day. Pickers wore gloves with two thumbs on each hand; flip the palm upward at mid-day and get twice the wear.

The young man never shied from work. Growing up a few miles from Clarksdale, Mo., the second of 13 children, John left school at age 16 to help with the family finances. It was an up-at-dawn farm life, abundant only in personal resourcefulness.

The Depression arrived in 1929 and the family savings, $400 in the bank at Clarksdale, mostly vanished. Years to come would become identified with ominous adjectives … the “drought year” or the “grasshopper year.”

John went to Iowa, an itinerant worker for homesteaders, working crops in the heat of summer and caring for livestock in the blizzards of winter.

It wasn’t like he met Nellie Miller when he returned to Missouri. He had known her as a small girl, their fathers mutual friends. But he encountered her at a church-sponsored pitch tournament at St. Joseph Church in Easton.

“I thought, this nice-looking lady, I’d pick her for my partner,” Buhman recalls.

Turns out she was a good card player, too. They won the tournament. His luck would continue.

A month or so later, John had a spy, Nellie’s brother, tell him which boxed supper she brought for an auction at Spring Hollow Grade School. He planned to get it no matter the ascent of bids. He paid $5, a lot of corn picking.

“That was OK,” John says now. “It turned out great.”

The romantic gesture that pinched the wallet proved long-haul wisdom. John and Nellie married on Nov. 11, 1936. Going on 73 years, they remain married in St. Joseph today.

But an enduring love story has endurance as its requisite. John Buhman, who turns 99 today, credits his fitness to hard work and good genetics. (Ten of his parents’ children survive.)