Our Wedding

 I found the 1965 letters I was looking for, so here is the story of our wedding.  I've put today's explanations in italics

To shorten 3 long paragraphs, I'll say that the afternoon before the wedding, I had a hair appointment in San Francisco, but nearly didn't make it because the traffic had been stopped because President Johnson was in town for the UN Anniversary celebration. But I did finally get to the beauty parlor where they did my hair and I had the first manicure I'd ever had...and the last I had until Walt's sister's wedding a few years ago.

We had dinner at my parents' house and then to Berkeley to the Newman Center for rehearsal.  "No one told me that the bride was to be director of the rehearsal.  But it was Tim's first rehearsal (new priest, our friend Tim Toohig, who had just been ordained the week before).  Things got pretty bad.  There were kids and people running all over the place, instruments rehearsing (the Newman hall choir did a Mozart mass as a gift for me, since I was a member of the choir) and all was utter confusion.  Somehow we did get through the rehearsal, but I had very little confidence in the outcome of the wedding afterwards!

Our dinner was at Wilkinson's, marred only by the absence of Gladys, but was otherwise fun.  (This was just a coffee shop where we had breakfast every Sunday and we decided that would be the most "meaningful" place to have the dinner...but our favorite waitress, Gladys, wasn't there, which was a disappointment).

Then we went to our respective homes to try to sleep.  Joyce brought a bottle of champagne and she, Karen and I drank that before going to bed.  We had a long conversation and I really took gas for packing a book to bring with me (I finished it too!)  I managed to sleep until 2 a.m. at which time I wandered around the apartment until about 4 and at last was able to get a bit more sleep.

The morning of the wedding, I was surprisingly calm.  Everything at the apartment seemed to go off all right.  The cameras worked, Mischa (the flower girl) looked darling, the dresses matched, the bridesmaids were fairly well behaved, the flowers looked good, and the photographer arrived on schedule.

When we left our apartment, my father got to talking to the firemen across the street and talked them into wheeling the engine out for us to pose on.  That picture appeared in the SF News-Call Bulletin.

Then to the church, where I started to get butterfly-e, but people started arriving and greeting me and they started to go away.  I felt just great. . The highest compliment I received was from my sister, who is not prone to compliment me.  We were in line ready to go in and she turned around and told me that I looked beautiful.  It was the only time I got tears in my eyes.  When the music started, I was too worried about making sure my father didn't cry to be nervous.  Before I knew it, Walt was saying "good morrow, good lover" and we were on our way to the altar and Tim.

Tim did a marvelous job.  His voice is not that of Mario Lanza, but it was passing-good.  As it was his first wedding, the pre-ceremony instructions that he read sounded more like he meant what he was saying than it usually does when read by some veteran priest.

We had a beautiful day for the wedding, which I consider a special smile of God.  The whole thing from the wedding down to the end of the honeymoon seems to be a God-given gift.  The Brazilian room (where the reception was held) looked gorgeous, the cake was beautiful, and the food was delicious.  I tend to run to superlatives when describing our wedding, but everything was so unexpectedly perfect that I can't help it!

At cake-feeding time the photographer said that we did the best job of stuffing he had ever seen

We left the reception in the Rambler, which was tastefully decorated with shaving cream, ribbons, lipstick, and the usual festoonings.  They blocked the wheels with rocks but the Rambler mounted the obstacle and we went roaring off into the Berkeley hills.  When we got to the Tempest, we remembered that I left my overnight case at the hall, so Jeri and Bill were dispatched to the Brazilian room to pick it up.  Walt and I drove out to the cemetery to leave my corsage at his father's crypt.

(I was a little disappointed when we got home from our honeymoon to find the corsage in our refrigerator.  Apparently Walt's mother had also gone out to the mausoleum and decided I probably would like to keep the corsage.)

Our wedding night supper consisted of food left over from the reception.   They packed a nice little supper of potato salad, gooey cake, ham slices, etc. and the guys from the Physics Department made styrofoam container for a bottle of champagne, to keep it cold.

Our ultimate destination was Canada, of which I said, "We entered Canada around 9 in the morning, encountering no trouble with customs and seemingly entered another world.  British Columbia was so green.  It was filled with fields of wild daisies and countless streams, brooks, rivers and tributaries of rivers.  At every turn in the road we were hit with more beauty and it got to be frustrating because just as you were sure that there could be no more perfect scene, the road would turn and you would be faced with a different landscape, more beautiful than the last.  The lakes we passed were just like glass, and the sky was full of fluffy white clouds during our whole stay in Canada.

Just outside Cransbrook, B.C. we caught our first glimpse of the Rockies...and a better glimpse you couldn't ask for.  The sky looked like it was full of these beautiful clouds until you looked hard enough at it and realized that some of the "clouds" were the peaks of the Rockies, which were shrouded in the clouds.  This too was "breathtaking."  And it began my romance with the Rockies.

After this first glimpse, the range just kept unfolding before our eyes.  Mountain after majestic mountain, getting more snow-covered the farther north we moved.

And so it continued.  Everything was perfect.  We made the acquaintance of several bears, three moose, numerous deer, and even a wolf and a couple of mountain goats.  These are the things that you see pictured in travel brochures, but they never really happen to you...they did happen to us, but I'm sure only because we were on our honeymoon--the whole world seemed to love us.

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