Courting Mary, Part 2 - The Wedding

Mary’s younger sister, Angie, moved up from Oklahoma that fall to try life in the far north The two got an apartment by Lake Spenard, at which I spent considerable time. Angie stayed till after Thanksgiving, but decided she preferred a hot, humid, and conservative Oklahoma, to a cold, wild, and free-wheeling Alaska. Mary needed a new roommate or she needed to move. I needed to look after my house, and invited her to move in with me. We transfered her stuff on a cold day during the Christmas vacation of 1981. All went well except for a couple plants that didn’t care for the temperature they had to endure.
Fast forward a few months to a Chinese restaurant on the corner of Minnesota and Benson Avenues. I proposed marriage over a sampler “Poo Poo Platter”, our favorite appetizer plate. She said she didn’t know. We always wondered what significance we should ascribe to the fact that the place closed shortly thereafter.

We arrived upon an agreed October date. Neither of us had much enthusiasm for big weddings, so we decided to have a small ceremony at the house and to limit the wedding list. We sent out no invitations and asked only a few close friends. We were both teaching at West High School, the number of possible attendees were enormous, so we decided to let word-of-mouth take it to where ever it went. When someone asked me about it I would tell them they were invited and what time to show up. I had given the end of the year faculty party at my house several times over the years so all knew where we lived.

Charlie Hostetler arranged a bachelor party for me at Clinker Daggers. About a dozen, mostly fellow teachers from West High, escorted me out of single hood with a raucous dinner that was apt for the occasion. Luckily we all made it home without police intervention.

I was finally getting married after forty-two years of blissful bachelorhood. There was a bit of a quandary concerning my upcoming wedding though. I had no idea who to ask to be my “best man”. There would have been no problem if my brother Don had been available, but as he was farming in Wisconsin, and had neither time nor money to break away, I was in a puzzlement to decide the stand in. I could ask Charlie Hostetler or Dan Wilson. I had done a lot of things with both of them over the years, but to ask one seemed to be slighting the other. Then there was Doug Jackson and Wes Warner. And there were others, a bunch to pick from, and under different circumstances any one of them would do. So I kept procrastinating till nearly the last minute, and then one day the answer presented itself.
Mike Bujno had been my renter roommate for five years. He was from Poland and we were talking one day when it occurred to me that Mike was also one of my good friends. We had liked each other from our first meeting and had come to respect each other. He had entrusted me with his life savings one year when he went back to Poland for a extended visit. He handed me a sizable cashiers check in my name, and wanted me to keep it in case something happened to him. I said fine, but what did he want me to do with it in case something did happen. He wanted me to send it to his parents in Poland. So Mike was a perfect choice for best man. He was my newest friend, and kind of neutral. I ask him then and there and I think he was surprised and flattered by my request.

Next we needed a person to tie the knot, and luckily, there lived one right next to us. Gordon Corbett, a Presbyterian Minister, and his wife Winn had been neighbors and good friends for ten years. Gordon said he would be happy to perform the wedding, so Mary and I reworked the traditional wedding ceremony, omitting items such as obedience of the wife to the husband, until it was nearly unrecognizable.

The day soon arrived, an overcast Saturday in October. We had two cakes, one that said, “Macho Mary, and Big Bad Joe”, and the other was inscribed with, “A Computer Programmed Marriage”. The second one had to do with the fact that we had just completed a college course in computers and were thus proficient in throwing around arcane terms like BYTE, CPU, RAM, ROM, and GIGO which stands for: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. Word of the wedding got out. We had a full house of guests but were not swamped. There was a good variety of participants, and they segregated themselves to upstairs and down. The more straight-lacers were up stairs and some of their noses twitched as whiffs of wacky tobaccy wafted up from below, but all went well. I asked Charlie Hostetler to take photos of the ceremony and all was ready except that the best man and the maid of honor were missing. Both came after the ceremony was over. I looked around and saw Wes Warner standing in the back. Mike was my newest friend in Alaska and Wes was the one I’d known the longest, so I ask him to sub for my sub. Pat Tremble, a former striper at PJs was to be the maid of honor, Mary ask Rita Atchison to sub. Rita, a former student of mine, was married to Johnny, who use to live above Mary when she was on Roosevelt Street. And thus we commenced our adventurous and tumultuous life together.