Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Not about language, but another installment in the Memories of Ann Daingerfield thread, about our wedding on June 16th, 1962. Recollections from Ann’s great friend Benita (Bonnie) Bendon Campbell, appearing here with her permission and my notes.

(For Ann’s grand-daughter Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky.)

It was a lovely wedding. On, I believe, a Tuesday afternoon. (Put the fact checkers on that bit.) [My Princeton graduation was on the 12th, a Tuesday, and the 16th was in fact a Saturday.] We may have all attained sufficient champagne. There were supposed to be 150 guests at the reception – thus, 50 bottles laid on – but only about fifty very fortunate guests arrived. So, a bottle apiece. All those groomsmen at Professor Stillwell’s house on The Great Road. Wedding presents in unfailing supplies – mostly silver trays. [Oh my, so many trays.] There is still a remnant of the Liberty of London knockoff fabric from the bridesmaids dresses in my piece box, in the basement. I sewed those dresses By Hand. Ann looking ravishing in her Irish linen and Cluny lace gown. Bought at Lord and Taylor. Miss Magic Fingers (they really called her that), the specialist in bridal headgear, arrived in the dressing room, bearing several appropriate coiffures. Ann rejected them all, then took the last one, turned it sort of upside down and backwards, secured it on her head with little combs and said, “There.” On view yet today in her bridal photograph. Ann, striding boldly through the Male Only bar at the Nassau Tavern, saying something like “Close your eyes, boys – I’m coming through,” so as to reach the sequestered getaway car. And off you went to Lenox MA for your honeymoon. Fifty years – oh my.

Notes:

1. Richard Stillwell (1899-1982), Howard Cosby Butler Memorial Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton. He was the father of one of Bonnie’s great undergraduate friends at Bryn Mawr, the late Theodora Stillwell MacKay (a noted Greek classicist). Through Bonnie, Theo and her father (and later her husband Pierre) became friends of Ann’s and mine.

2. The getaway from the Nassau Inn was engineered by Priscilla Hill (1900-1985), in whose elegant house (on Mercer St.?) Bonnie and Ann lived when they were first in Princeton, before they found more spacious accomodations (with an actual kitchen at their disposal) on Nassau St. Priscilla drove us to the Stillwell house, where we recovered our car and drove on to a motel not far away, before going on to Chanterwood in Lenox the next day.

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