Pete and Juanita Escovedo celebrate 70th anniversary

Oh, our anniversary? Your anniversary? On the 21st. 21st, okay. Yeah, but we still... East Bay native and music icon Pete Escobedo is known for his legendary career as percussionist, bringing Latin jazz to new audiences. But the Escobedo family has something else to celebrate. Pete and Juanita Escobedo celebrated 70 years of marriage over this past weekend. Beautiful. Yes, seven decades. So how did they make it all work? Well, Pete and Juanita, join us now live in studio. It is wonderful to have you both here with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. So nice. Congratulations. Yeah, 70 years. That is a milestone, right? It is. It is a milestone. So can you, Juanita, I'm going to ask you, can you just take us back to the moment when you met Pete, and did you know, I'm going to be with this man for the rest of my life? No, but when I saw him, I told my girlfriend, I said, that is the cutest boy ever. But he was about this big, soaking wet. He was so little. But he had on a white shirt and a brown jacket over his arm and brown slacks and brown shoes. Suede shoes. You still remember? Wow. Oh, yeah. That was cool. Pete, what do you remember about that night? And why were you attracted to Juanita? Well. He wasn't at the time. Oh, is that right? He came to see another girl named Jeannie Mays. I remember. All right. We're getting real scoopy. And one look at her stole my heart away. Oh, may it come to store. love that first bite when did you realize though that this was this is the person you wanted to be with for the foreseeable future for for the next 70 years well we dated a little bit for a while not too long yeah we're in high school yeah so so we did date date a little while and after we got to know each other and our families and stuff like that and because she came from her family's from New Orleans so my family's from Mexico so it's a little different there you know races and stuff so yeah yeah it was hard for their parents his parents wanted him to marry Mexican and my parents wanted me to marry a Creole from Louisiana which there weren't very many Creoles in Oakland yeah a lot of latins but uh my mother told him that he would have to ask my dad if he could marry me and he was so afraid of my father that was the scariest day of my life well but but you got the blessing obviously and here you are so everyone wants to know what the what the secret is right I mean how did the two of you get through all of these years and and I'm sure there have been challenging times but but how did you how did you how have you made it 70 years together that seems like forever and ever but you go i think day by day you know and you come before you know it well we had our 25th wedding anniversary we had a big party went through the church back to the church and then we had our 50th wedding anniversary we went back to the church we had a couple hundred people then we had our 60th wedding anniversary and then uh this is our 70th so now we're going to go one year at a time pace yourself a little bit right i mean obviously you have an incredibly talented musical family i'm sort of curious over the past seven decades how how has music helped to sort of help this relationship to to grow it's been so important part of our family because uh all the kids you know are all musicians they all want to play music They're all doing very well. And for parents, you know, we sometimes go to some of their concerts to watch them, watch them perform. And we're so proud of them. We're always surprised that they're up there, you know, entertaining us, too. And so it's really a blessing for us to see all of that happen. And I think that's what keeps us really more together in a sense than other families is the music keeps us together because we're all in the same profession. And it really helps that we support each other. We travel with each other and it's just a lot of fun. And so it seems like not only the love of music, but also I'm guessing that you instilled some qualities in your children. right and that that has also helped you as a family and as a couple yes yes well we you know we made many many many mistakes through life and uh but that's part of life is growing up and you know we were very young when we got married and sort of like well you know you learn each year more and more about each other and our likes and dislikes and sometimes uh we wake up now and I still don't know who she is. So who's this strange woman in my bed? I don't know. We might go to the store or something, not recently, because we don't go shopping very much anymore, but he will purchase something and he'll come home and I'll say, what did you get, honey? And he'll show me and I'll go, I would have never bought that for you, even after 60, 70 years. Some things that are still unpredictable. Yes. Yeah. And he's very unpredictable, but he thinks that I am. You know, it works. But, you know, people ask us, how did you stay together that long? And it's not a secret because, you know, you have to go through life like when I was 19, he was 21 when we got married. And, you know, we've changed. I've changed from what I believed then. and he's changed, so how do you stay together when you could easily grow apart? It's so easy to grow apart, and I think that's why there's so many divorces and everything. Yeah, but it's the lessons that you learn in life, you know, that you go through, and hopefully you don't make the same mistakes again. And sometimes, you know, some of those things made us even grow closer together because we said, well, if we would have went another way, our lives would have been different. But because we stayed together and we worked through the hard parts of our lives and got through it all, and we started here in Oakland, and, you know, it was a very, very hard beginning. But, you know, luckily God looked after us, and we're doing great. Yeah, you guys are. You've been blessed, haven't you? We used to get the blue chip stamps. You guys wouldn't know about the blue chips. I don't know. They don't remember that stuff. They're too young for that. But I'm curious. They used to come. I think they used to come in the mail. We used to get them blue chip stamps. It helped you with your food. You bought food with that. Got it, got it. And we used to go. I used to go to this place where I would get a box of food, canned goods and breads and everything. And then, you know, we had like bricks for our tabletops. and you know uh you were a young couple starting out yeah yeah yeah trying trying to make it work and we tell the kids how you know it was and you know we didn't have any money it was really really really rough and they said i don't remember that i don't i didn't know that we were poor Well that's probably the best compliment yeah yeah they did not know yeah and those hardships that brought you closer together yeah yeah but it's it's the fans first of all god took care of us all through until this day now and our children are christians and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and we have a bunch of those yeah i know you do a big beautiful family well congratulations on 70 years thanks and here's here's to many more thank you we're gonna work on 80 now all right Let's go. No, 71. You said you're taking it one year at a time now, right? Exactly. Well, thank you, and again, congratulations. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Thank you. God bless. All right, we'll be back with much more news here on The 4 after this.