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Boomers? Parents Reach 60th Anniversaries ? Romance of Simple WWII Weddings

By | November 26, 2008

America?s first baby boomers are looking at their sixtieth birthday. That would suggest that a large number of 60th wedding anniversaries have also occurred in the last year among the generation that parented the boomers. Interestingly, census statistics indicate that the marriage rate among Americans reached its highest point sixty years ago in 1946. Never before or since have so many Americans married. Behind these 60th anniversaries, given the state of the world in 1945-46, there is probably a fascinating and possibly romantic story waiting to get out.

As Tom Brokaw wrote in The Greatest Generation, (Random House, 1998),?weddings were put on hold or pushed up? to accommodate the impact of WWII on the lives of ordinary people, throughout the world. But when the surrenders were signed, marriage was apparently on the mind of many survivors. Early in 1946 the religious department of an Austrian agency handling displaced persons (DP) petitioned the allied military governing their area of Europe to release enough gold to manufacture 10,000 wedding rings for DP brides.

In the romantic WWII memoir, Still Life with Violin, (Belle Cora Press, 2005), Ingeborg L?k?s says of her October, 1946 wedding to abstract artist, Stefan L?k?s, ?It was not the wedding of a little girl?s dreams, but it was a wedding like thousands of others performed across Europe, the United States and Canada in the years after the War. Time, money, facilities, place dictated how people arranged and celebrated the most significant experiences of their lives. Strangers in a hotel took the place of family, and tradition was a luxury that had to be put in the back of a closet, to be pulled out sometime in the future when the heart of the world beat more regularly once again.?

Recent studies indicate that the cost of the average wedding in the U.S. is approaching $30,000, twice the amount of my first house. Beautiful fantasies are created for all involved with these hefty bills, every conceivable detail plotted. Technology has come to the modern American wedding reception, in the form of video productions. Music accompanies the story of the bride and groom from infancy through their courtship, with thoughtful tributes to parents, grandparents, family. Disposable cameras in the middle of reception tables have given way to video cameras. Perfection has become so important and the details so myriad that planning a wedding is too much for a mother and daughter to work out. Professional wedding planners add to the bill. Champagne fountains, off shore locales, miles of satin and lace, exotic themes, color schemes create the illusion of romance.

But are they romantic? Not an answerable question, I admit. One man?s treasure is another man?s trash. One couple?s romantic wedding is another?s self-conscious grasping for meaning and depth with plastic fingernails and phony traditions peddled by advertising genius.

A good number of those DP brides, whose wedding rings were forged from war time booty, eventually immigrated to the United States. Ingeborg L?k?s who was married in Salzburg, Austria in 1946 didn?t get one of the requested wedding rings. But her wedding was probably very like most of those 10,000 DP brides. She wrote in Still Life with Violin, ?We recruited a Hungarian musician and another guest from our Gasthaus as witnesses and went off on the seventh of October to the city hall of Salzburg to be married?.I was wearing my only good dress, which was elegant, though not very bride-like. It was satin silk, with a high collar, buttons along the shoulder, long full sleeves, a simple lifted bodice, and a straight skirt that hit just below my knees. Without the ruffles and flounces of most wedding dresses, it was neither revealing nor demure?and it was black!?

I hear that it is now going out of style, as things do so rapidly today, but people like Ingeborg may be surprised to hear that for several years black in color schemes has been popular with wedding planners and couples.

Brokaw documents in The Greatest Generation wedding after wedding that took place with out a budget, a planner or even an engagement in the mid-1940s. When my father returned from the South Pacific in the spring of 1945, he stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming to visit the girl who had been writing him faithfully for three years. He was in route home to San Antonio, Texas to see his parents, before returning to the Alameda Naval Air Station in Oakland, California. Two days after leaving Cheyenne to continue that journey, he was back on my mother?s porch. When my grandmother asked what he was doing there, he said, ?I?d like permission to marry your daughter.? Three days later they were married at the court house in Cheyenne and the next morning left for Oakland. The marriage lasted until his death over 45 years later.

These may not have been the weddings of a little girl?s dreams. There was no chance for many to honor their parents and grandparents, with even an invitation. The bride and groom would find out the details of each others childhoods in the years to come. The witnesses often were, as in Inge L?k?s case ?just names on a document in black ink. They shared no history with us and we would never know their future.? But Ingeborg L?k?s descriptions in Still Life with Violin of her wedding and the adventures that followed her and husband, Stefan, are the stuff of romance novels, as I imagine are the stories of many of the sixtieth wedding anniversaries celebrated this year.

Still Life with Violin
Ingeborg L?k?s and Martie LaCasse
BelleCora Press 2005,192 pgs.
ISBN 0-9771054-0-7
$14.95 BelleCora.com or Amazon.com

The Greatest Generation
Tom Brokaw
Random House 1998, 446 pgs
ISBN 0-375-50202-5
$24.95 Book Stores or Amazon.com

Santa Fe, New Mexico based feelance writer and editor.

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