Editor's Note: This piece first appeared in a wedding program. A few minor corrections have been made based on genealogical research subsequent to the initial publication. On March 18, 2012, Sarah and David will be "married again for the first time", but under different "code names" and subject to a different "codex"! An abridged version of the original along with a bridge to somewhere will be posted soon after. Stay tuned.
July 16, 2000
HowWeGotHere.Com
We celebrate today – and every day after – our marriage and the marriages of our parents. After all, our story begins with them.
We suppose it is possible to find in both lineages a Sarah and an Abraham. We know there is a David. As it turns out, unexpectedly, there is a Sarah, too.
Our story does not begin with the begats, but with “Sophie and Willie” and “Doris and Dick,” our much-loved and honored parents. They are with us today – and every day after – in example and spirit.
On April 16, 1941, Sophie met Willie, on a blind date that featured a movie and a soda at the A&W Drive-in. He wooed her with a letter composed entirely of the titles to the popular songs of the times. They married, 57 years ago, in Baltimore. Their families came, both of them, from small villages in Russia and Ukraine via Ellis Island in the Roaring 20’s.
On July 4, 1934, Doris met Dick after seeing him on his favorite horse, Chief, in the parade through the six-block-long Main Street of Glendive, Montana. They sparked and courted at barn dances and such until she reached the legal age of eighteen, when they bought a ring for the enormous sum of $15 and eloped. They celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary before Dick died in 1993.
Dick’s family came to America in 1886 via the same Ellis Island route that Willie’s and Sophie’s families later traveled.
Albert Bell, age 16, left a small Indiana farm in 1863 to enlist in the Union Army. Discharged two years later in Arkansas, he moved to Missouri, married and raised a family. One son went north on a cattle drive to Glendive, Montana and became the first sheriff of McCone County. His brother Dudley followed after, met and married Elizabeth Guelff and fathered four children, the last being Doris, born one month after Dudley died in the 1919 Spanish Influenza epidemic while hauling a horse drawn wagon of wheat to the rail head.
Past as prelude, fast forward to the end of the end of the century – the end of the millennium! At 56K, on May 28, 1999, David received a cyber text from a correspondent code-named “Sarah” (you know, “You’ve Got Mail!”). Intrigued, it was love at first byte. Ten days of energetic e-mail followed, including an inadvertent collateral mailing from Sarah’s confidant, Phyllis, whose computer apparently “replied to all” with the prescient and characteristically direct advice, “Why don’t you marry him?”
On June 6, 1999, (a date newly made familiar by another Hanks’ film), they met in Philadelphia and dined at La Famiglia, lingering long after all other had left. Their correspondence was never the same, nor was much of anything else. He read to her for Dante’s Inferno, Canto V; she read to him from Why Sinatra Matters. They discovered a common passion for words, word games and literature, so a library proximately located to Baltimore’s Scrabble Alley and Roslyn’s high school haunts, seemed a fitting place to marry.
At year’s end, they went to Salt Lake City where Roslyn met Doris and a representative sample of the Holzworth clan. It was love at first sight. Back east, David was feted and vetted by that Washington cabal that can only be described as Friends of Roslyn (you know who you are), and apparently survived the process.
On March 1, Y2K, overcoming numerous objections to the form of the question, David tendered to Roslyn a certain “holder” ring purchased for $15 in 1937. It fit perfectly; she accepted.
Next day, they paid a surprise visit to Sophie and Willie. En route, David scanned a special wedding edition of the broadsheet, “Washington Jewish Week,” and asked such trenchant questions as, “What’s a chuppa?” – which he pronounced as though it were a close phonetic cousin of a Mexican entrée. Fifty minutes later in Baltimore, after much laughter and coaching, and aided by the post-nasal drip of spring allergies, he managed a passable utterance: “We have come to announce a simcha involving a chuppa.”
So … here we are to celebrate a simcha involving a chuppa, the marriages of our much-loved and honored parents, and the treasured friendships of all who are with us.
