Meeting the Brides Family

Michelle: Do you remember when Colonel met your brothers, Sara?

[At the same time]

Sara: I think maybe they were in Iran.

Colonel: OH YEAH.

Michelle: Was it intimidating?

Colonel: Oh no, no, no, not before we were married.

Michelle: You met her brothers after you were married?!

Colonel: After we got married. See there was a war going on! They were all away at war.

Michelle: Andrew and James?

Colonel: Yeah. Andrew was in the Figi Islands. And James was flying out of that Attu. The island off of Alaska.  United States has a military base there.

Pete: Is that the farthest one in the Aleutians?

Colonel: Yep, yep. That’s where they flew over Japan, from there. Over the Korean chain of islands.

Colonel: I had one sister [Ruth] and when the war was over, she and Bill Heistler [spelling?] were married. The marriage took place in the Valley Forge Baptist Church in 1949. My father had died of cancer in August and the wedding delayed until fall because of his illness and so on. Then it was an October wedding but Sara and I were attendants with Ruth and Bill and a picture was taken of the four of us in this Baptist Church. Ruth and Bill had two children – Tracy and Glenn. Tracy had three children and one of them is being married next month. Bill, he is doing graduate studies at Stanford or Cal or one of them, I can’t remember, Chemical Engineering.

But he’s getting married and Tracy, his mother, asked me if I had any pictures of Ruth and Bill or others of an earlier period of time which  - she didn’t ask just me, she asked a lot of people – which they can put on display at the reception. So I can’t look very well, but BethAnn went through all of our old pictures. And she came out with an 8.5x11 picture taken in October 1949 of Bill, and Ruth, and Sara, and me. And you know, I mean, how we were dressed. It was different! Then today! But that will be the hit of the reception, when people look at that picture. I didn’t make a copy of it, but I mailed it to Tracy. If she mails it back, I will show you. If not, then I left it with them. Its more valuable to them.