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Home > Archive > Jul 19, 2007

A Match Made in Heaven
By Cami Cox
Staff Writer
Eight isn't enough for a local couple. Wilbur and Jacqueline Wortham, of St. George, are preparing to embark on their ninth mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“As long as our health will last, we want to continue to serve,” Wilbur Wortham said.
Diligent in their service, the two have spent many years sporting missionary nametags, and it was actually a mission many years ago that brought them together.
Wilbur Wortham's son Doug was serving his own Latter-day Saint mission in Belgium when he met the woman who would become his mother.
A Belgian widow with three children, Jacqueline Wortham spent a great deal of her time helping the missionaries that served in her area. One day, she met an Elder Wortham. As she got to know this young missionary, he mentioned to her that his father back home was a jet pilot.
“I almost jumped out of my chair because I love jets!” Jacqueline Wortham said. “So knowing that he would say yes, because missionaries are nice, I asked him, 'When you write to your father, would you please ask him to send a picture of a plane, because I like airplanes?' He said, 'No, you write to him.'”
That suggestion touched off a long journey for two strangers who were then living an ocean apart.
Young Elder Wortham's father, a widower with six children, didn't read French, so in order to write to him, Jacqueline had to compose her letter in English, which was difficult for her.
“Her English was not fluent at that time, but she could communicate,” Wilbur Wortham said. “When I received the letter from her, the first letter, then I got a picture of the airplane I flew. She didn't ask for a picture of me, she wanted a picture of the airplane. So I sent her a picture of the airplane, and within the week, I thought, 'Well, I'll write her another letter.' I wasn't looking for a wife, that's something you have to understand. I just thought it would be nice to have a pen-pal.”
Wilbur was a pilot in the Air Force when he began corresponding regularly with Jacqueline.
“This was before e-mail, so a letter took seven days to go and seven days to come back. But we began to correspond,” he said.
The two got to know each other through their letters. Jacqueline was a convert to the LDS faith, so she had many questions to ask this American man about the church and about raising her family within the church.
“After I received the picture of the plane, I thought, 'Huh, maybe I can ask him questions. He doesn't know me, there's an ocean in between, I can ask any questions,'” Jacqueline said. “He was alone with kids, so he would answer my questions.”
And answer them he did. Wilbur wrote many long letters to Jacqueline, and she responded, using a French-English dictionary to aid her in her replies. A romance quickly developed between the two.
“After she received the letters, she would ask (my son Doug) to read it and make sure she understood correctly,” Wilbur said. “One time, Doug said, 'Dad's going too fast.'”
“I thought, 'I'm not going to show him any more!'” Jacqueline said.
Within two months of the first letter Jacqueline sent Wilbur, the two were engaged.
“I fell in love with her spirit – not what was written on the letters, but I could feel her spirit in between the lines,” Wilbur said. “In my seventh letter to her, having never even seen a photograph of her, I asked her to marry me, and she accepted. You've heard it before, but now I'm meaning it seriously. This was a marriage arranged in heaven.”
Engaged in December 1974, the two weren't able to meet in person until the following July, when Jacqueline flew to the United States to meet her soon-to-be husband.
“We met in Salt Lake,” she said. “I couldn't go back to his home with him, that was not proper, but his parents were there.”
Wilbur was stationed in Boise, Idaho, at the time, and after spending the weekend with his future bride, he returned to Boise, and she went to stay in Grand Junction, Colo., with his parents. He flew down to meet with her again the following weekend.
“We had two weekends together is what it amounted to,” Wilbur said.
In January 1976, Jacqueline came to the United States with her three daughters, and she and Wilbur were married at his parents’ home in Grand Junction. She was 34 and he was 41.
“We've been married over 31 years now, and it's been a honeymoon ever since,” Wilbur said.
A language barrier initially existed between their children – Jacqueline's daughters didn't speak any English – but it didn't stop the new siblings from becoming fast friends.
“Just to show you how the family blended so rapidly, the first night that they met together in Grand Junction, they were playing Monopoly on the living room floor together,” Wilbur said. “The girls had a little pocket dictionary, and when they wanted to communicate, they'd look up the word in French and show it to (the other kids). Then they could read the English translation of that word – 'buy,' 'sell,' 'rent' – you know how it is playing Monopoly. And so they learned to play together. We told the kids from the very beginning, 'There is no stepmother, no stepfather, no stepbrother, no stepsister. It's mom and dad and brother and sister,' and we've been that way ever since.”
When Wilbur retired from the Air Force, he and Jacqueline moved their family to St. George. When their youngest daughter graduated from Pine View High School and moved away from home, the two decided to serve a mission for their church; Wilbur was 52 and Jacqueline was 44.
In 1984, they entered the Missionary Training Center in Provo preparatory to embarking on their first mission to Lima, Peru, and the couple has been going strong in their missionary service ever since.
“We came home from that mission and were home two weeks and turned in our papers to go again,” Wilbur said. “This time, we were called to Geneva, Switzerland.”
After completion of that mission, their third call was to Peru again, this time to serve at the Lima temple. About six months after arriving there, they were asked to relocate and start a mission in French Guiana (in West Africa).
“We were the first missionaries to go to French Guiana – it was not part of a mission at that time,” Wilbur said.
After that mission, the two returned to St. George, and Wilbur became a truck driver, for three years.
“We needed to catch our breath,” he said. “We'd been constantly on a mission for over three years.”
It was then off on their fifth mission, this time to Liege, Belgium, where they served in the family history archives.
“Our sixth mission, we went back to the same position,” Wilbur said. “We replaced the couple that replaced us – right back to the same apartment, the same job, same everything.”
Their seventh mission was to the family history department in Salt Lake City; and after that, the two were called again to Belgium, which is where they will be serving yet again on their ninth mission.
Though the years have slowed them down just a bit since that first mission call, the Worthams aren't slowing down in spirit.
“I don't feel like I'm 74,” Wilbur said. “We were on our first mission before some of the missionaries going out now were even born.”
“The missionaries called me Mom – now they call me Grandma!” Jacqueline said.
The two sweethearts are still as happy as newlyweds, and they're looking down the road at many more years of service together.
“When you are on a mission, you do the same work, you have the same goal, and you grow spiritually   together,” Jacqueline said. “That's the thing I really like.”
“It's truly been a marriage made in heaven,” Wilbur said.

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