GRANDPA & GRANDMA’S WEDDING DAY
By Mrs. Jerry (Connie) LaGrow
Rt. #1 Box 61
Cherokee, Oklahoma 73728
January 2005
Honorable Mention at State
Three more years and Grandpa and Grandma LaGrow will be celebrating our 50th
wedding anniversary on July 13, 2007. So I want to tell you about our wedding day,
Saturday, July 13th, 1957. Grandma had completed her first semester of college at OSU
studying Home Economics and Grandpa had completed two years at OSU studying
accounting. Grandpa had given me my engagement ring the summer before and we
thought we were ready to get married. Of course we wanted to be married in the church
we both had attended, the Jet Methodist Church, where we had sat together in church on
Sunday mornings and after youth group on Sunday evenings.
The day started off as planned with me going to have my hair fixed at a beauty
shop and then to the church to finish up any details we hadn’t finished the day before in
preparing the church for our wedding with candles, and preparing the basement of the
church for our reception. George Jordan, a friend and local baker was to make and set up
our five tiered white wedding cake. He had decorated it with white and pink icing with
big white sugar wedding bells and pink roses with a miniature bride and groom at the top.
My three aunts were to serve at the reception along with two cousins of my mother’s.
Well, I’m getting ahead of myself aren’t I?
This was a year that my Daddy was still not quite through with the wheat cutting.
So he headed for the fields to cut some left over mud holes and to stay out of everyone’s
way. I had asked my cousins that came and spent two weeks in the summer with us every
year to be in the wedding.
We lived in their home while their Dad made a career of the Air Force. They had
asked us to move into their home just west of the Timberlake church when I was to be a
Freshman in highschool. Before this we lived in a little two-room house on the correction
line that didn’t have indoor plumbing or running water. So when they called and asked if
we wanted to move into their two story home with gravity flow water from the
Timberlake springs, a bathroom, four bedrooms, huge living room, front-screened in
porch, and a back porch that would serve as our laundry room/mud room, we all thought
we had died and gone to heaven. So whenever they had vacation time from the military
service, usually Christmas and summer, they came to stay in our home for two weeks.
They had four kids all younger than I with the oldest being six years younger than me.
The youngest were Ward and David and they were about five and six AND very
unpredictable but were to serve as the ring bearer and the escort for the flower girl in our
wedding.
Our flower girl was the same age as Ward. She had a crush on your Grandpa.
When we attended Sunday morning worship while dating she would come and sit with us
but she always sat between us because she didn’t want me sitting by Grandpa. So we
thought it would be appropriate for her to be our flower girl at our wedding.
The little boys evidently could feel the tension in the house so they went outside
to play that morning. Being boys, they spotted a skunk, and being city-kids, they decided
to follow it between two close buildings on the farm. WELL, the skunk lifted its tail and
there was no place for the boys to run since they were pinned between the buildings and
they were sprayed with that lovely odor from that animal they had followed, after they
threw a stick or pebbles at it.
Needless to say no one wanted them in the house so their mother took them to the
stock tank with soap in hand to try and wash the odor off before the wedding that
evening. IT DID NOT WORK! Now that matters were now even more tense, the boy’s
mother decided to take the boys clothes and them and go to her sister’s home in Helena.
She continued to try and get the obnoxious odor off the boys by washing them in tomato
juice. David and Ward didn’t quite seem to see the seriousness of the matter, so they
were chasing one another down the stairs at this aunt’s and David caught his hand on
something on the railings of the stairs and cut his hand open. That’s right! Now they had
to find a doctor to take stitches in the cut of his hand before the wedding!
With their mother, the two little boys and their sister at their aunts at Helena,
things at our home on the farm calmed down a little bit. My sister was to be my maid-of-
honor, and she was six years younger than I. That would make her going into the seventh
grade! I don’t recall this but she told me that I decided she was old enough to have her
legs shaved and I would do it since this was my wedding and I wanted her to look her
best. She claims that I nicked her several times with the razor so we had to cover her legs
with Band-Aids. I’m also sure, since that I always had to wash and roll her hair before a
date, that this wasn’t any different and that her hair was also my responsibility. She got
out of a lot work by saying she had to “practice the piano” and never did learn to roll her
hair on curlers.
Grandpa chose young men to stand up with him that he had either grown up with,
played football together in highschool with, or friends he had met at OSU . . . My
bridesmaids were Aunt Lana, my longtime classmate and OSU roommate, and a friend
that lived across the hall from on the second floor of Willard Dormitory.
My grandmother helped me make my bridal dress from a picture I found in a
Brides magazine. She and Grandpa had given me a featherweight portable sewing
machine for highschool graduation so we both sewed on it together at her home. My veil,
I had borrowed from a cousin of my Daddy’s that lived in Enid. Not only had I made my
wedding dress but I also made my going-away suit in a Clothing/Textiles class at OSU. It
was a blue two-piece suit with a straight skirt and 3/4 length sleeves on the jacket with a
large shawl collar. I know that it is hard to believe but Grandma weighed 123 pounds
when I married your Grandpa.
Our photographer, was a friend of Grandpa’s who took a lot of pictures. (That is
my only regret that I didn’t have a professional photographer because our pictures are
starting to fade and our heads are cut off in some of the pictures.)
Well, on with the day! A classmate of Grandpa’s had gotten married a few days
before us and you couldn’t hear the vows because the church had just installed a new air
conditioner and it was really noisy! So my mother decided that the air conditioner would
be turned off for our vows so the congregation could hear, on July 13th, (one of the
hottest days of the year) 1957! It was ooooooooooooooooo so hot! When we knelt for
the singing of the Lord’s Prayer, Grandpa was perspiring so badly that droplets dripped
on my hand. Grandpa told me later that he was afraid I would think that he was crying!
After the ceremony the wedding party went directly to the basement for the reception, and
when Grandpa and I and the best man and Aunt Lana, got down the stairs of the church
Grandpa took off his suit coat and his and the best man’s shirts looked like they had been
dipped in a tub of water. (It was awhile before I told him it was his new mother-in-law’s
idea to turn off the air-conditioner.)
Grandpa worked in the fields for a local farmer in the summer and put in a lot of
hay by bucking bales and did not wear a hat or shirt so to say the least he was really dark.
Friends told him before we got married he needed to wear a sign around his neck saying
he was ‘white’!
After the reception, we went out to get in Grandpa’s 1954 red and white Chevrolet
car and found it covered over with the usual stuff of “Just Married!”, tin cans trailing,
shaving lotion on the windows, rocks in the hub caps, and what we didn’t know until we
went to wash the car was two young kids had taken red fingernail polish and written on
the white top of the car and it wouldn’t come off. (We later had to have the car
repainted!) The two little rascals that put the red finger nail polish on the car were the
banker’s and the doctor’s son. Grandpa’s friends got in front of the car and behind the
car and escorted us with horns blaring and made us travel seven miles to Nash at only five
or 10 miles per hour before they would let us go any faster and make our way to
Oklahoma City to begin our honeymoon to southern Oklahoma.
Well, Grandma and Grandpa have had our ups and downs in our marriage but we
have never considered divorce and the blessings of our two children and five grandsons
have been worth every one of the 47 years together.
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