Everybody's Doing It

Day after day, in thousands of homes, dressmakers bumped around on their knees with their mouths full of pins. In 3,050 U.S. counties marriage-license clerks filled out documents with callous haste, barked, "Now jusraizyurighthands!" Florists toiled. Bakers baked. Female clerks batted eyes, gushed: "Something blue? Blue garters are sweet." Thousands of perspiring bachelors took a quick drink, straightened, and went out to give themselves up. Judges, justices of the peace, clergymen paused, cleared their throats.

It was June again.

In the ten months since V-J day the uniformed groom had all but vanished, taking with him a dress sword made gooey by wedding-cake icing. But thousands of other props which had been abandoned during the war were back again. From Westchester County to the Monterey Peninsula, from Philadelphia's Main Line to Miami's palm-bordered mansions, society weddings were being planned, costumed and produced as ponderously as musical comedies.

Crowds & Cops. Some weddings were bigger even than their sponsors had expected. Last week Pittsburgh's Mayor David L. Lawrence carelessly announced that "everybody" was invited to his youngest daughter's wedding. To his amazement almost everybody came; cops had to clear a lane through mobs of curious housewives to get Daughter Anna Mae and her husband out of the church.

But little weddings were different, too. Much of the change was reflected in the groom's expression. Marriage no longer seemed like one more hurried step in a process calculated to get him out to an island where the Japs could blow his head off. Occasionally a groom still got the spotlight—as last week when Byron ("Whizzer") White, Colorado's All-America Rhodes Scholar and naval hero, married pretty Miss Marion Stearns at Boulder (see MILESTONES). But mostly husbands-to-be could let their knees knock in peace.

The honeymoon was back again, too. Newlyweds shook rice out of their pockets at Niagara Falls, Atlantic City, Hot Springs, White Sulphur Springs, Crystal Springs, Bermuda, French Lick and Mexico City. Most stayed as long as possible, having no homes to come home to.

The June moon, the sparkle of early fireflies, the perfume of flowers and the adrenalin inherent in the human system still stirred up a certain sprightliness in some of the young.

In Grand Junction, Colo., an ex-Army Air Forces officer named Ralph L. Atonides left a friend's wedding-eve bachelor dinner early. Once in the clear he picked up the bride-to-be, a Miss Francy Bigs Kurtz, flew her off to Las Vegas and married her himself.

In Detroit, pretty Miss Mary Grace Simescu, queen of the Automotive Golden Jubilee, sneaked out of her parents' house before dawn, met a handsome ex-Navy flier named Clifton W. Woodry, eloped with him. The parents were pleased but slightly bewildered. She had been engaged to him all the time.

All the organ music almost drowned a faintly ominous message from Reno: June divorces were bigger, better and fancier than ever, too.