68 Years ago

[susandennis]

I just realized that today is my parents' wedding anniversary. 1948. They celebrated 51 anniversaries together.

When I was a little girl I hated this picture taken just after their wedding in Oklahoma City (Crown Heights Christian Church). I was very resentful of the fact that my mother did not have a dramatic white wedding dress that I could play dress up in. This really was a big thing to me and I stayed pissed at my mother for a really long time.

Mom was 24 and had been married before to a guy who was killed in France during at the end of World War II. Daddy had never been married before.

His mother, the tallest one, was a mean, resentful, ignorant woman married to the guy on the far left who was the nicest and funniest.  My Dad was also 24.

My Mom's Mom is next to my Dad. She was The Perfect Grandma. Born and raised one of 7 in central and east Texas, she was also a wonderful hugger.  Her husband, far right, was sweet and nice and taught me to love baseball and suffered horribly from glaucoma for a long time.

I also just realized what today is kind of an odd fact.  None of these six people were every divorced and all three marriages passed the 50 year mark.  (My own marriage lasted about 10 minutes, my brother was married 3 times - the shortest of those was the middle one of 8 years, my sister's husband died after they had been married 20 years.)

None of this group is alive today. My father's father died first, when I was just about to finish college. The rest peeled off one by one. My Mom lasted until 2005.

I was very lucky to have had them all.

Comments

[ayebydan]

Interesting to read about :)

It does get to me that people get all 'i must have a big traditional wedding with a big white dress' when white dresses are a very recent thing and originally were a rich people thing. And yeah most women post world wars got married in a skirt suit. People also don't seem to realise that so many men got married in uniform not for any sort of military reason but because it was the only decent suit they owned. Wedding history is very interesting in general.

But I'm sorry you didn't have one to play in! I take it others around you did?

[susandennis]

All of my friends' mothers when I was little had white wedding dresses to play dress up in. And fancy photos of their parents all 'dolled' up cutting the wedding cake. It was certainly a given in my neighborhood.

[meowmensteen]

Wow, thanks for sharing that picture and story.

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

My grandmothers made it to their 80's; but lost their husbands much sooner. One of my grandfathers was 54 when he passed, the other in his 60's. My parents were married 62 years; both died at 82 (well, actually mom passed 9 days before her 82nd birthday).

I loved both grandmothers more than I can express.

[badrobot68.livejournal.com]

My parents celebrated 50 last year! Pretty impressive!

[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful picture. My grandma was married in a suit. A lot of women then got married in their best suit. (I love how everyone is dressed. A great snapshot of fashion.)
On my side of the family there are divorces here and there but on my husband's side? NO ONE seems to get divorced. They just hang on for dear life. Or something.