RETIRED Stewart's Melville College chaplain Wallace Shaw and his wife Lesley, a former Westburn Primary School teacher, will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary on Saturday.
The Colinton couple met in the late 1950s, when Wallace was an American philosophy graduate who had recently crossed the Atlantic from his home in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Alone on his first Sunday in Edinburgh, he popped into St George's West Ch
urch and found himself in the middle of rehearsals for a concert that included numbers from the musical South Pacific.
Encouraged to take part, Wally was soon giving voice to "This Nearly Was Mine", with a young Lesley Ballantine accompanying on the piano.
Lesley, 71, said: "A friendship developed during the practices and over coffee afterwards."
In 1959 they were married and moved to Brooklyn, and then to a charge in West Hampton Beach, Long Island where their first child, Alison, was born in 1961.
"We found religion in America gaudy but Godless," said Wally, 75. "We returned to Edinburgh where I got a job as an assistant at St George's West with special responsibility for young people."
The long-term legacy from this time was the writing of the first of the "Living Bible" series which was to comprise six books, a best selling series in its field.
Called to St Margaret's Church in 1964, the year their second daughter Fiona was born, the Shaws began their usual enthusiastic approach to community life.
Their third child Andrew was born in 1966 but Wally still found time to attend to parish duties, write religious books, and take a PhD in religious education at St Andrews University.
The pair also found time to launch Operation Friendship, a youth exchange programme that still runs today in 13 countries.
In 1976 the family returned to Edinburgh where Wally took up a post with Stewart's Melville as chaplain and head of philosophy and religion. Lesley meantime took a teaching qualification and took up a post at Westburn primary school.
In retirement they are both deeply involved with The Radicals, a theatre group that seeks to highlight the Scottish Enlightenment. It will present its fifth production at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
Haddington couple John and Cathie Robertson also recently marked their golden wedding anniversary.
The couple, who live in Somnerfield Grove, met in 1955 when they both worked at the West Lothian County Council HQ in Linlithgow.
After courting for the next three years, the pair got engaged, and were married in Redding and Westquarter Church on 20 June, 1959.
The newly-weds moved to Haddington that year, and John took up a post with the county council in East Lothian, in environmental health.
John, 78, rose to the position of director of environmental health at East Lothian Council, and retired in 1991 after 44 years in local government.
Falkirk-born Cathie, 73, who worked for 11 years in the Tranent-based community alarm service and retired in 2004, once had the rare honour of being president of three community groups at one time – Haddington Inner Wheel Club, Gladmuir Parish Church's Women's Guild and the ladies' section of East Lothian Conservatives.
The couple have two daughters – Mary Preston and Andrea Hill – and four grandchildren.
