Laughter and never going to bed angry with your loved one are the keys to a long and happy marriage, according to Archie and Lillian Minors.

And they should know - they celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary on Saturday.

"If we have our differences during the day we know to never go to bed mad, Mrs. Minors said when asked how they had stayed together so long. "By the time you wake up, you forget what it was you were mad about.

"We have enjoyed ourselves because we like doing the same things. We used to play tennis and go to the movies or pedal somewhere and have a picnic together," Mrs. Minors, who is 91, said.

"We're still very happy now," she said, adding that Mr. Minors, 90, is still a "true gentleman" and "they are hard to get these days".

Now retired and living in their Shelly Bay home, which they bought while they were still working especially for their retirement, the Minors' have seen Bermuda change from the time when they married.

And they have lived full lives too. They moved to New York City during the Great Depression, started Archlyn Villa guest house in St. George's at a time when most hotels would not take black people and later travelled all over the world.

It all began in 1933 when "we met at an old-fashioned dance in 1933 and he asked me if I wanted to dance", Mrs. Minors recalled.

On June 21, 1934 they wed at St. John's Church in Pembroke.

At the time, they could not have a honeymoon: Mr. Minors had to go to work the very next day to print menus at the Elbow Beach Hotel.

It would take another 50 years for them to have their honeymoon when they decided to make a trip to Hawaii for their wedding anniversary their honeymoon as well.

"There were a lot of places we had travelled, but when we went to Hawaii we decided this was our honeymoon on our 50th wedding anniversary," she said. "Honolulu and many of the other islands we visited were like nothing we had ever seen before."

Their first trip was to New York City, were they moved during the 1930s.

After working at the now-defunct newspaper The Bermuda Recorder and also as a printer at The Mid Ocean News, Mr. Minors decided to move to the US to learn to set linotype, Mrs. Minors said.

"I went with him and studied beauty culture. I took a teacher's course and I was going to open up a shop in Bermuda, but then the war knocked everything out of everybody's head and we had to wait to do just about anything until the war was over.

"When things got better we bought a building in St. George's to start a guesthouse. Friends we had made in the United States kept telling us that there was nowhere for tourists to stay when they travelled to Bermuda.

"So without much knowledge about the hospitality industry we opened up our own guesthouse and I sent letters to all of our friends to advertise Bermuda and our place, which was called Archlyn Villa.

"We were very popular because we were the only place that would take black people," Mrs. Minors said.

In order to gain knowledge about the hospitality industry, Mrs. Minors said she travelled to the Hotel and Motel Convention in New York where "I could choose a category about anything I wanted to know concerning the industry and I was able to take a class to learn about it. That's where I learned everything I needed to know about hotels."