A boy, a dinner jacket and a new chapter in life

By Bill Fields

Late in the afternoon on Saturday, Sept. 3, 1966, I had a small part in a wonderful event. A very small part.

I was, like the mums, gladioli and snapdragons in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, a decorative touch.

When you’re getting married and have a 7-year-old brother — as was the case with my sister Dianne — you make him a junior usher, a role as vital as being a lifeguard in a parking lot. The groom, Bob, had a much younger sibling (named Bill, too), who also was enlisted for this non-essential duty. So the two of us, in dinner jackets like the rest of the males in the wedding party, gave no one a program and helped no one to his seat.

It was the best standing-around I’ve ever done.

The occasion had been a couple of years in the making, since Dianne and Bob met while students at Wake Forest College. She was a Spanish major, and he was studying biochemistry, which would underpin his esteemed career as a scientist-professor. They are both smart as a whip, with kind hearts, his patience balancing her energy.

It is difficult for me to remember Dianne without Bob because I was so young when they began dating. During their courtship, when Bob came to visit in Southern Pines, I’m sure I occasionally was 4 feet and 60 pounds of pain-in-the-neck when I sneaked up with a water pistol or begged them to come outside and shoot baskets. Any ambivalence about Bob becoming part of the family ended when he gave me my first Matchbox car, a red Ferrari, that made the cheap, tiny metal cars I bought at Pope’s dime store look like true clunkers.

The details from the Summer of the Wedding are hazy, but I remember lots of activity and conversation. The cake was made by Mrs. Bristow, whose house was out on the May Street extension north of town. I knew about “taffy” but wondered what was this “taffeta” that the dresses for the maid of honor (my other sister, Sadie) and the bridesmaids were made of. They were basically Carolina Blue, so whatever the material, that made me happy.

When the big weekend arrived, our house was full of cousins and anticipation. Months earlier the Fields clan had met the Broyles clan in Winston-Salem, a summit of familiarization and approval. The groom’s parents, who lived in West Virginia, put on the rehearsal dinner the eve of the wedding in a private room at Howard Johnson’s in Aberdeen, where the opportunity to have a hamburger and fries chased with an orange Fanta was about all for which a second-grader could hope.

My sister has recalled a sweet moment when she and my father were about to walk down the aisle, toward the altar and a new chapter in her life, and given the flood of emotions wondered if they both could make it. Arm in arm, they did, of course. It was a beautiful ceremony in that small, simple structure on the corner of New York and Ashe that sadly was torn down years ago when the church moved into a larger facility. The vows were followed by cake and punch in the basement fellowship hall that was the junior ushers’ favorite part of the day, followed closely by the throwing of the rice.

Dianne and Bob honeymooned at Fontana Village in western North Carolina. I have a remnant of their trip within arm’s reach on my desk as I type this — the painted stone head of a souvenir tomahawk they brought back for me. They also gifted me a Fontana Dam T-shirt with a cartoon of a bear on the front. I’m wearing it in one of our family’s favorite pictures, all of us posing on a couch suppressing a mighty group giggle.

No marriage is all laughs, but Dianne and Bob have had lots of them in five decades together, a union that has produced two children and two grandchildren, a union that is an example of living well.

It was an honor to be there at the starting line.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

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