It's an odd experience to look back at one's parents' wedding photo some 65 years after the fact. The other day I got an email from one of my classmates mentioning that her parents had just celebrated their 67th wedding anniversary. So I pulled out my parents' wedding photo and realized that if my mom were still alive, they would have been married 65 years.
My parents, Bjarne Slind and Mary Kathryn Mead, were married in Ellensburg, Washington in April 1942. Mom was 22 and Dad was just 10 days shy of his 22nd birthday. They met because Mom was a medical technologist at what was then Providence Hospital in Seattle, and Dad's brother Ole was doing his surgical residency there.
This wedding photo shows everyone in the wedding party. Probably it was taken by Otto Pautzke, the pioneer Kittitas County photographer. (Someday I'd love to know if the Pautzke negatives survived anywhere, for he took all the formal photos of the family. And almost all our photos perished in the fire that destroyed my grandparents' home in 1956).
The photo was shot in the "music room," where my grandmother taught piano lessons. The wedding party is standing in front of the grand piano.They were married at St. Andrew's Catholic Church in Ellensburg, which is the oldest Catholic Church in the Diocese of Yakima. The church was established in 1884, but my family arrived earlier, with my great-great grandfather Jacob Becker starting the town's first blacksmith shop in 1872.
My mom is wearing a wedding dress made from pina cloth from the Philippines. The fabric was a baby gift when she was born. The patterns were already woven into the fabric, so there wasn't a lot of latitude about the design of the dress. She's carrying a bouquet of gardenias and maidenhair fern, with white rosebuds tied in love knots. She's also wearing a sunburst wedding brooch on a white velvet ribbon. This was a wedding gift from my dad.
The bridesmaids are her two sisters, and one of my father's sisters. The bridesmaids' dresses are rather random looking and were, I believe in different colors. I have no explanation for the rather unusual things they were wearing in their hair other than to note that this was still an era in which all women covered their heads when in church. Dad's brother John Slind is his best man, and the other groomsman is my mom's first cousin James Mundy. The flower girl is a cousin of my mom's and, according to newspaper reports, "carried the wedding rings in the heart of a lily." (This wedding account was written by my Auntie Ida, who did wax poetic on occasion).
They all look very young, as indeed they were. This photo was shot eight months and one day before the attack on Pearl Harbor that changed their lives as irrevocably as the attack on the World Trade Center 60 years later changed ours. Dad went off to serve in the US Navy, one of the aunts became a military bride, and the post-war educational opportunities provided by the GI Bill meant that no one in my mom's generation stayed to work the farm.
Of the people in the photo, only my two maternal aunts and my father are still alive. Mom died of lung cancer in 1972, at the age of 53. Dad is now 87, and in assisted living on Mercer Island. The two aunts are doing well. And now, my parents' children and grandchildren look at this wedding photo and wonder what each person was thinking that day.
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