When John met Fritzie, it was not love at first sight. She didn’t like him much at all.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president then; war was raging in Europe. And Fritzie was a 17-year-old safety patrol officer faced with a younger teen who refused to listen when she told him not to cross the street outside of Patterson High School.

They fell in love anyway.

Much has changed since then. The Civil Rights Act passed. The microwave was invented. Men walked on the moon. Yet John Kitz, 102, and Fritzie Kitz, 103, stayed married for 79 years. On April 13, they toasted their anniversary at Brightview Senior Living in Towson, where both live.

The Kitzes, who raised their family in Glen Arm, may be the oldest married couple in the county.

Living to 100 years old is a milestone achieved by fewer than 90,000 Americans today, according to U.S. Census estimates, though more people are expected to hit that mark in coming years. Doing it with your lifetime married partner is even more rare. How rare? We don’t know, because the U.S. Census does not keep track of the married elderly. But with half of all marriages ending in divorce, and so few of us making it to 100, we can guess it’s not something most of us will see.

Fritzie, center left, John, and their daughters Cheryl Partridge, left, and Karen Kitz.

A love that lasted

What’s made it work for so long? Fritzie — whose real name is Frances, and whose friends call her Fritzie Kitzie — likes to talk; John has learned to listen. During an interview in their apartment, they hold hands. Their two daughters — Cheryl Partridge, 76, and Karen Kitz, 73 — occasionally prompt them to remember a detail.

Otherwise, they’re sharp. They live by the inscription in the ring John gave Fritzie decades ago when he returned from dozens of combat missions over Germany and Italy as a side gunner on a B-24 bomber during World War II: “I am you, and you are me.”

She was moved. “He was a person who hardly expressed himself, but we knew how we both felt, just by being together. We didn’t have to do a lot of talking.”

They married in a simple ceremony at her mother’s home in Canton, with the reception in the basement. For years, they lived in an East Baltimore rowhouse near where John built a business, Kitz Motors; Fritzie kept the books. She was the spark plug; he was the coil.

In 1956, they built their dream home in Glen Arm. John said he trusted his wife with the finances. She worked with the architect to design the house and picked out the furnishings. She wanted a big family room where the couple could dance; he agreed to an addition. She had a pool built, and swam in it regularly until she was in her 90s. She also enjoyed skinny dipping after a long, hot day gardening. Sometimes, she said, her female neighbor joined her.

Having grown up without much, both took pride in their Glen Arm surroundings. John was so insistent on a sight line to their neighborhood stream that he mowed the lawn in baseball cleats so he could clear every spot on the hill.

A wedding photo of John and Fritzie, center, with maid of honor Rose Shenk Hnatysh and best man Harry Bleakley.

A life long lived

Neither expected to live this long. Fritzie suffered from atrial fibrillation, a common type of irregular heartbeat. A supplement called nattokinase, a soybean-based protein that prevents blood clots, saved her life, she said. Antibiotics cleared a bleeding ulcer. Her eyesight is nearly gone because of macular degeneration and she suffers from occasional arthritic pains. She only left her Glen Arm home in January when she needed more help, including with food. Until just a week ago, when she fell, she was getting around with the help of a walker and using the bathroom herself.

Her husband’s health has been more precarious. He’s been in and out of the hospital, struggling to swallow food and also dealing with heart issues. In 2021, he went to hospice for a year — social workers told the family to prepare for the end. But then the staff developed a way to help him keep food down. To everyone’s surprise, Karen Kitz said, he was wheeled out of hospice. He’s been at Brightview since 2022, though he still needs his food pureed.

The daughters are constant presences at Brightview, as are the Kitzes’ longtime caregivers.

“They’re Energizer bunnies, that‘s what we call them,” Karen said of her parents.

Together now after three years of living apart, the pair are reveling in the twilight of their time together. They celebrated Valentine’s Day dancing to music from The Glenn Miller Band; Fritzie jitterbugged in her chair. They spend their days sitting together, often with their daughters, reminiscing about family crab feasts and nights out dancing and the little rowhouse they traded for their dream home in the country.

They know they are on borrowed time. They are making the most of it.

She is his, and he is hers.

John Kitz and Frances “Fritzie” Kitz hold hands.