Rosalyn Engelman was just 15 when she met her future husband, Irwin, she says. That was in 1953.
The two were set up by a mutual friend, and when Irwin, then 19, came to pick her up in her family’s home in the Bronx, “I certainly had not dated anyone like the tall, dark, handsome man in a navy-blue suit with a briefcase who came to my door,” she says.
“He looked like a movie star.” Irwin took her out for a movie and milkshake, and by the end of the night, they were falling in love, she says. After three years of dating, the two got married in November 1956.
In their nearly 70 years together, they had two daughters, stood side by side during life-threatening illnesses, traveled the world, and built their careers. Irwin worked as a CFO at companies like Xerox, and Engelman was a painter and mixed media artist whose work has been displayed all over the world, she says.
They now live at the Apsley, an assisted living facility in Manhattan.
