Getting Married

I can probably say that otherwise Odie and I might not have gotten married if the 102nd had gone to Europe earlier. As it was, we were able to be joined in marriage on July 16, 1944, shortly after she graduated from Regis College. Monsignor August L. Furtado, my father's first cousin, then pastor of St. John of God Church in Somerset, MA, performed the ceremony in St. Anthony Church in Pawtucket, assisted by Father Gus Mendonsa, a life long friend with whom I had been an altar boy at our parish in East Providence. It was a gala affair like one I had never attended. Her parents went all out! The celebration was at the Narragansett Hotel in Providence with a champagne fountain in the lobby and a meal of which everyone raved. It included lobster, filet mignon, and baked Alaska for desert. Odie had planned that the wedding party would go to the photographers after the meal, so as not to delay the meal, as had happened at other like affairs. There was only one drawback to this- by the time we left after the meal, most of the groom and ushers, and some of the bridesmaids had imbibed a little too much and it affected the quality of the pictures!

Our honeymoon was short because of the war. We spent the first night in Boston, the second night in Narragansett, and the third night in Jamestown where we were seen getting out of our car (a wedding present from my father, a 1939 Mercury Coupe), and were surprised the following morning when my aunt Lena Lopes arrived at our hotel door with breakfast in bed! Tony Lamb, a distant family relative had filled our tank with gas as a wedding present and it got us back to Lakehurst, NJ, to a rented home not far from Fort Dix. There were several other officers from our battalion living there. Our colonel usually rode with me, his wife kept their car.