Last month, Emily of Emily Takes Photos shared her great-grandparents delightfully simple wedding with us. Today she’s sharing her grandparents wedding (Christine is their daughter). Christine and Dominic are celebrating their 60th anniversary this week, so today we get to hear their best marriage advice, and all about their simple wedding (which they informed their families was the last time they would be attending church). So let’s hear it for grit, backbone, and plenty of style.
They met in 1948 at UC Santa Barbara. Grandma (Christine) ran the science storehouse and Grandpa (Dominic) met her while he was taking a chemistry class (and no, neither of them made any joke about “chemistry”).
Dominic got a scholarship for school in Wisconsin, and they discussed whether Christine would stay in California or if they would get married and she’d join him in Wisconsin. They decided to get married (no crazy elaborate proposal or anything).
They got married at the Mission in Ventura, because they had family in Bakersfield and Santa Barbara and wanted to make it easy for everyone to travel to the wedding.
Except in their day, apparently if you got married at a church outside of your hometown, it was usually because you were expecting a baby and wanted to keep hush about it. Which would explain why five months later they received Christmas cards address to Mr. and Mrs. Dominic Perello and family! (They didn’t have their first kid until four years later.)
They had a short ceremony with no Mass (a full Mass is common at Catholic weddings), and according to my dad, they told their families that would be their last time going to church(asserting baby family FTW!). Grandma remembers the priest called in an altar boy from the nearby baseball field to help with the ceremony and that he slopped holy water all over the place.
They wanted to keep it really simple. Dominic’s brother Gene and Christine’s cousin Mary Ann were the only bridal party members, and all the guests were family only. They hosted a prime-rib dinner at a nearby inn for their guests, cut the cake and that was that. They had a quick change and left immediately for Wisconsin.
Their 60th anniversary is August 18 (this Thursday). I asked my grandma if she had any advice for couples getting married today, and her answer was, “You mean other than the Marquess of Queensberry rules for boxing?”
