Anne Marie (Kurtz) Novinger ’57 checks in at 89—and shares her secret to 67 years of wedded bliss
It’s a meet-cute story that bears repeating: Anne Marie Kurtz ’57 met her future husband, George Novinger ’54, in a bedroom of the ATO house. “George had been injured in a football game against Pomona, and he was sitting on the bed, with his leg in a cast, where the girls put their coats and purses,” she recalls. “I immediately fell for him because he was very good-looking. George said he’d been smiling and waving at me on the Quad for weeks, but I would look the other way because I was very nearsighted. I didn’t like to wear my glasses—I thought they made me look icky.”
When they finally went out on a date three months later, as the two said good night on the porch of Haines Hall, “I said, ‘George, I want to tell you a secret,’” Anne Marie says. “He leaned down to me and I kissed his ear. George later said that was the moment he fell for me.” Four months after that, the couple secretly eloped to Las Vegas before the school year was over.
George graduated from ձ in June 1954, but Anne Marie dropped out after a single year of study, much to the disappointment of her mother, 1922 alumna Anne Marie Jacobsen. “Our family has seven people who went to ձ, and all of them graduated except for me and my mother,” she says. “But I was determined to finish college.”
It would be another 15 years before Anne Marie, by then the mother of three, would complete her degree in biology from Cal State L.A., and from Pasadena City College’s nursing program two years later. She spent four years working in the Los Angeles and Glendale school districts before taking a job in 1975 as a nurse director at Glendale Community College Clinic, where she would remain for the next two decades.
In 1982, George was offered a job he couldn’t refuse: After 27 years at Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale, he was selected out of 62 applicants for the job of principal of Tehachapi High School. Anne Marie remained in Glendale, and the couple commuted for 13 years between Tehachapi and Glendale. “It was good for our marriage, because we got on each other’s nerves when we were both working so hard down here,” she says. “It turned out to be a blessing.”
After retiring as principal in 1992, George became a ranger naturalist in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest east of Bishop. “He was very popular teaching people about these ancient trees that were over 4,000 years old,” Anne Marie says. Soon after she moved to Tehachapi in 1995 to be with her husband full-time, George announced that he and a business partner were going to buy an old packing shed that had belonged to Anne Marie’s uncle, J.C. Jacobsen, and turn it into a retail space. Initially, “I sort of bristled,” she admits, but the three opened the Apple Shed—a 64-seat restaurant with a bakery, gift shop, and fudge factory—in 1996.
“George would work mornings on the restaurant side and I would work afternoons running the gift shop,” Anne Marie says. Over the years, her customers included Oscar-winning actor Jack Palance, actress and comedian Lily Tomlin, and Oprah Winfrey, who dropped in one day for lunch with her boyfriend, Stedman Graham. “When they left, everybody waved at her from the porch—and she waved back,” she recalls.
In 2013, Anne Marie published her memoir, Where Did Murtz Come From? And How Did She End Up in Tehachapi? “I wrote the book so that my children and grandchildren would know about my life and about their part in it.” The process took more than six years, but “I had a lot of fun doing it,” she says, “and readers told me they stayed up all night reading it.” The book sold over 500 copies. (To answer the titular question: “Murtz”—a play on her maiden name—is a childhood nickname that stuck.)
Following the death of their partner and manager, the Novingers sold a majority interest in the Apple Shed in 2005 with an eye toward finally enjoying retired life. In 2015, they sold the business to manager Mano Lujan and his wife, MeiMei, who renamed it The Shed. Citing family obligations, the Lujans closed the restaurant for good in December 2016.
Good news: There may be life in the old shed yet. “We’re in the middle of a big process to turn the property into the Apple Shed Historical Museum,” Anne Marie says. “We’re setting up all the legalities and gathering memorabilia to go in the building.”
A fifth-generation Californian, Anne Marie now lives in La Crescenta with daughter Barbie Novinger ’81. She remains a big booster of Occidental, having created a charitable remainder trust (with George) with a gift of Apple stock to the College in 2006.
Much has changed in Anne Marie’s life since the book’s publication. Son George “Tom” Novinger ’81 and his wife drowned while vacationing in Hilo, Hawai‘i, in 2017; and her husband passed away in 2022 after 67 years of marriage. Does she have any desire to update her memoir? “Well, I only have seven copies left, so I’m thinking I could just republish it,” she says. (The occasional copy pops up on Amazon.) “I’m 89, for heaven’s sake. I just walked four blocks and it feels good to sit down.”
