It was the year the Dunedin couple were married, 60 years ago this week, on March 2, 1957.
Mr Stevens was a hooker in the Otago rugby team that won the Ranfurly Shield, in Wellington, in that "very special year".
In those days, he was not to know that, after the team later lost to Taranaki (9-11), it would be another 56 years before Otago won the shield again, with a 26-19 win over Waikato in Hamilton in 2013.
And in 2013, a photograph, published in the ODT, showed Mr Stevens and Otago teammates from the former shield-winning team holding the celebrated shield aloft once more.
More than 70 family members and friends gathered when the couple celebrated their diamond anniversary at the Southern Rugby Club, in Dunedin, yesterday.
Mr Stevens (86) is a life member and patron of the Southern club and has been a member since 1945.
"This club’s been good to me. I just love this club."
It taught him many valuable life skills, including loyalty, discipline, teamwork, and punctuality, which he also found useful in his successful business career, which included stints as Otago manager of the TNT Alltrans transport firm and as the firm’s Auckland-based national general manager.
When he captained the Southern team which won the Dunedin senior championship in 1958, he ranks that as an equally important achievement for him as the shield win the year before.
Mrs Stevens (82), nee Mockford, and her husband have both long played competitive sport, she earlier as a tennis and squash player, and also in recent years as a successful super senior tennis player, representing New Zealand overseas in age-group competitions.
They both had their own interests but supported each other over the years, and also raised four sons, Mark, Brent, Blair and Scott, together, she says.
Now they also have nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
"That keeps us busy," he added.
"We’ve been able to have our own space and we’ve been tolerant of each other’s interests."
They have also kept physically fit, she still playing tennis four or five times a week and he pedalling an exercycle for 40 minutes each day.
Life was not easy for either of them
when they were growing up, she at Berwick as one of nine children, and without a great deal of money.
He spent some of his early life working as a rabbiter before later moving into management.
Yesterday both were happy they still enjoyed good health and had each other, and they had much to celebrate on what Mr Stevens termed "a special day".
