Tim and Jane Paulson celebrate golden year in Hancock Park
TIM AND JANE Paulson were married in 1973 at Blessed Sacrament Church in New York City.
On a beautiful fall afternoon in the backyard of their Hancock Park home of 38 years, Tim and Jane Paulson threw a big family party to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Toddlers ran around, food was catered and the weather was golden.
Jane had always wanted a fall wedding. When Tim proposed to her in June of 1973, she immediately said yes. They were married just a few months later, at ages 23 and 24, in November –– two days after Thanksgiving.
“We were a relationship waiting to be declared,” Jane said.
Tim and Jane met at Georgetown University. He was a junior, she was a sophomore and they ran in the same circle of English majors: writers, poets and people who would go watch Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini movies.
“We met at a party,” Jane said. “It was an eclipse party — a total eclipse was coming the next day. I was sitting on the floor, and Tim came over and said, ‘I heard you like Yeats.’ We started talking about Irish poetry for a few minutes.”
This was in the spring, and they hardly saw each other afterward. Jane did not return to campus for the fall semester. She went to England and Ireland to study, of course, Yeats.
“We were destined once [she] came back,” Tim said. “We still all ran with the same crowd.”
But then it was Tim’s turn to move out of the country. He pursued a master’s in English in Toronto, whereas Jane moved to New York City, where she worked for the American Dance Festival. Tim would visit her and mutual friends, and they wound up having dinner together and talking. She also visited him in Toronto.
“There was a big shift,” Jane said. “Both of us sensed that the relationship either needed to become more or it was too hard to just be friends anymore.”
After earning his master’s degree, Tim moved to New York City and proposed a few weeks later. They decided on a small wedding. Jane wore her mother’s 1940s wedding dress and made her bouquets out of straw flowers. Their wedding reception was at a small restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The great pride of the reception was their wedding cake, baked by the famous Miss Grimble.
Their honeymoon in Portugal marked the beginning of a long-shared love for travel. Instead of buying their first home, they spent their savings on a year of travel around Europe.
“We’d been married a couple of years when we went, and it turned out to be like super glue,” Jane said.
After more than a decade on the East Coast, they relocated to Los Angeles for Tim’s job in advertising sales for The Economist. They had three young boys in tow: Jay, who was 6; Robert, who was 3; and Christopher, who was only 8 weeks old.
The day they arrived was the opening ceremonies for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. They had a first home in Venice and moved two years later to North June Street, where they have lived ever since.
“The minute we found Hancock Park, it was love at first sight,” Tim said. “Jane grew up in Kansas City, and I grew up in Memphis. This old neighborhood with trees that actually lost their leaves in the fall — it looked like midtown Memphis or Kansas City.”
THE PAULSONS celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in November 2023.
They now have seven grandchildren; six boys and one girl. Following the death of their middle son, Robert, they have been raising their grandson Lion, a junior at Loyola High School.
“It’s been fun to be back raising a child again because, second time around, he keeps us young,” Jane said.
Writing is also what keeps them young. Tim has written 12 novels, two of which are published. Jane is the author of a “how-to” guidebook for pregnant career women. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America, having worked for the soap opera “Santa Barbara” and for Fox Kids Network and the Discovery Channel.
Jane continues to write screenplays. Tim considers himself a novelist with a day job. He left advertising sales 10 years ago and now works in real estate, currently at Plus One Real Estate.
According to Tim and Jane, there is no trick to reaching 50 years of marriage.
“It helps to be really good friends,” Jane said. “We had that foundation. We were lucky.”
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