Two years after they got married, Tom Cooper and Donna Schwanke-Cooper decided they wanted to see more of each other.
“We got talking about how nice it’d be if we could actually work closer together,” Tom said. “And at one point, she thought, well, ‘If I just get a little building, I can stick it out in Tom’s parking lot.’”
The couple owns two neighboring Sterling Highway gift shops. Together, they’re called “Two Rusty Ravens.”
“I have horn, antler, bone, stone and ivory,” Tom said. “She's got vintage items, antiques, her watercolor paintings, cards, all that stuff. Jewelry, housewares, baby clothes.”
Tom and Donna work as a team. This week, Donna was out with an injury. Tom watched her place while she was gone.
“We kid the customers about the competition next door, but she sends people over here all the time and I try to send people over there,” he said. “And if she needs something moved, a table, she just hollers and I run over there and we move it. And if I need a label printed up, she can handle that.”
They weren’t always retail neighbors, or spouses. When they met in the 1970s, Tom was fresh out of the military. Donna’s late husband, Roland, offered Tom a job.
“And so, I worked for him for eight years,” Tom said. “And of course, when I first took the job, Donna was back in the states with her parents. One of them wasn’t doing well. And so I didn’t know her for a couple months, working for him. And then when she came back, I think she said something to him about, ‘Why would you hire anybody from New York. If he would’ve filled out an application, I would have rejected him right away because his spelling was so terrible.’”
First impressions aside, Tom and Donna became friends.
Eventually, Tom stopped working for Roland. He and Donna saw each other less, though they kept in touch.
Then, Donna’s husband passed away. A few years later, Tom lost his wife, too.
“She came to the funeral,” he said. “And she came with another gal that had lost her husband. And she had said, ‘Well, if you ever get lonely, give us a call because we meet as singles and have dinner once in a while together.’”
Eventually, he took her up on that.
“And then we started seeing more of each other,” he said. “We got along real well. We both had gift shops, I mean we had a lot in common. And a lot of old history together. And my late wife had admonished me to find somebody. And so I checked with my daughter that lives nearby and asked permission, basically, if I could go dating. And she gave me her blessing. So we just started seeing each other.”
Tom proposed to Donna in Fairbanks, at Golden Heart Plaza on the banks of the Chena River
In 2013, Donna moved her business from the Blazy Mall to Tom’s lot. She bought the old Lucky Raven Tobacco building and hauled it out to Sterling.
Tom said they have different working styles. He self-identifies as messy. Donna’s more organized.
“There’s a lot of things that I can’t — I don’t even own a computer,” he said. “She bought me this, she’s dragging me into the new century with an iPhone.”
Even so, he’s a fan of the technological upgrade. Now, even when Donna’s at home, the two can stay in touch.
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Long before they married or started Homer Truffle Co., David and Evangelina Briggs had candy in common.
“There was history with chocolate and confection making from David’s side of the family,” Evangelina said. “And oddly enough, from mine, too. But more with his.”
For over a decade, David’s mother ran Tundra Chocolates in Wasilla. Evangelina’s parents worked at a candy factory in San Antonio, Texas, when she was a kid.
But the first stages of their relationship had nothing to do with chocolate. They met in training with the Navy, in Texas, and married at a small ceremony in 2014. David planned everything.
“For me, it was the most romantic thing I had ever experienced,” Evangelina said.
In 2016, the couple moved to Homer. They wanted to start a business and settled on chocolate, since they thought that was missing from the city.
Like Tom and Donna, they found their contrasting skillsets complimentary. Evangelina said she’s a list writer. David isn’t. Evangelina has a degree in culinary arts and David has a degree in business.
“It is kind of interesting how the pieces kind of did fit,” he said. “Where the things that I actually enjoy doing, she does not want to do. And the things that I’m not quite creative enough to develop, down to the science, the measurements of a recipe, per se, she is. So it is kind of uncanny how it just kind of fit into place that way.”
They might have different approaches. But they say they’re grounded by their shared mission.
“We would want to create joy, levity and a means to get away through chocolate,” David said. “Through the chocolate that we make.”
Another key is open dialogue, Evangelina said. Especially since they both have strong personalities.
“So even when we’re frustrated, even when there are negative sides to it, we need to tell each other because that’s the only way we could figure out a solution,” she said.
They originally started their own business so they could spend more time with their kids. And their 3- and 5-year-old boys are involved with the best part of business — tasting.
Their older son is particular about food.
“And so if I need to know whether something is good or not, he’s a very good judge of character,” Evangelina said. “But when it comes to flavor, my younger one, he’s the more experimental one and he will try anything.”
That makes figuring out dinner plans hard. But it’s perfect for testing chocolate.
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Charity Lehman and Jason Wilson tied the knot in December 2019. But four years before that, they made another commitment to each other.
“Since we signed our names on paper together in this business, and we’ve taken on debt together, we’ve been bound to each other already, since 2015,” Charity said. “Getting married didn’t seem like a huge deal to me ’cause it’s like, ‘I’m already bound to this man.’”
Charity and Jason own Shearwater Cove, a yurt lodge and kayak tour business in Resurrection Bay. They met in 2013 when Charity was renting Jason’s geodesic dome in Seward.
They didn’t start dating until a year later. At that time, Jason owned the property that houses their current lodge.
“I don’t think we ever sat down and made this conscious decision, like, ‘Oh, let’s go into business together,’” Jason said. “It was just like Charity said — I’ve got this property, I showed it to her. We had started renting the dome for extra income. I don’t know, it just kinda happened.”
They began work on the lodge a year after they started dating. It was still early in the relationship but Charity said it felt natural.
“Maybe because we started the business when our relationship was young and everything was still new, that got us through some really tough times building,” she said. “We were out building in a remote place on our own. We didn’t hire a contractor or anything. And we built in some pretty nasty conditions. Lots of rain. Freezing sleet and snow. Bad weather. Hauling wood and cement bags and living in a little box that we had built, a 4-by-8 plywood shack until we had a yurt up. And maybe it was adventurous. It was also really hard.”
It’s been important for them to make sure not all their time together is centered around their business. That can be hard at the peak of the season.
“In the summertime, as soon as I come home we’re talking about what happened and what’s happening tomorrow and what’s happening the next day,” Jason said.
But Charity said this winter, they’ve been blocking off separate hours for business meetings.
“Because I think a problem you have when you’re a couple and you own a business is that it can consume your relationship, and that’s all you talk about and that’s all that you’re trying to do,” she said.
Three months before COVID-19 landed in Alaska, Charity and Jason got married in a small ceremony at Point Woronzof. They lived with friends in Anchorage for most of the pandemic.
Despite the dearth of out-of-state tourism, their summer shaped out OK. They had a lot of bookings from other Alaskans. Charity thinks it helps that their business is pandemic-friendly, since it’s in an isolated spot and guests stay in self-contained yurts.
“So I think we both kind of feel this relief this year, like, ‘OK, this is actually a really wonderful thing that we’ve built together,’” she said. “And there’s a pride in that, too, and I think that helps kind of cement your bond. But it is funny to call him my husband.”
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Over four decades since meeting, Tom and Donna got married Jan. 1, 2011, at 1:11 p.m.
They’re celebrating their 121st anniversary. As in, 121 months.
“When we first started dating, people would see us. And you don’t see too many older couples that are kind of cuddy together,” Tom said. “And they said, ‘Oh, how long have you guys been married?’ And it was kind of embarrassing to say, ‘One or two months,’ you know? And so, every month we had an anniversary. We still celebrate every month on the first.”
People ask when they’re going to retire.
“But we have absolutely no desire,” Tom said. “What will we do? We live for our own shops and each other’s shops.”
For now, they’ll be at their shops, enjoying each other’s company.
