The hands of bride and groom are seen in Indio, California, April 11, 2015. (Getty Images)
Harvey and Irma Schluter have been married for 75 years. But the Washington state couple received the shock of a lifetime when they learned that they shared their names with back-to-back recent hurricanes.
“I don’t know how they’ve done that, to have a Harvey and Irma,” Mrs. Schluter told the New York Times. “I don’t know how that worked out.”
The World Meteorological Organization has altered names for tropical storms that form over the Atlantic since 1979. The names are constantly rotated unless the hurricane is extremely costly and deadly. In those cases that name is retired.
It was just fate that brought the names Harvey and Irma together on the WMO's list, just as fate brought together the Schluters -- who during their years together fostered more than 100 children and taught at the same Sunday school, the Spokesman-Review reported earlier this year.
The couple met in 1940 and married in 1942. Harvey recently celebrated his 104th birthday while Irma will turn 93 in November.
How did they manage to weather the storms of marriage for so long?
“It’s not hard,” Irma told the Spokesman-Review. “Not at all.”
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