VINTAGE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Long-ago coverage of weddings captured grandeur, delightful quirks — and boredom

Greek mythology explains our desire to find love this way: Humans originally had four arms and legs and a head with two faces. Fearing them, Zeus split them in two, and people spend their lives searching for their other half.

Attempts to restore harmony to Zeus’ mischief happen often in summer and autumn — known among lovebirds as the wedding season.

Through the years, the Tribune has published many accounts of weddings — mostly the high-society kind — by describing the bride’s attire or the groom’s business status or the lofty parentage on both sides. Sometimes the weddings take a quirky turn with couples exchanging vows on a motorcycle or at the Belgian Village at the World’s Fair.

“About 250 persons witnessed the ceremony which made Miss Dennehy the wife of her childhood playmate,” the Tribune wrote in September 1921. “The couple’s parents both lived on Astor Street in Chicago.” The groom, Hempstead Washburne, was the son of former Chicago Mayor Hempstead Washburne Sr. “The bride wore her mother’s white satin gown with Spanish lace and a veil of tulle held together with orange blossoms.”

A wedding announcement from 1925 diverged from the usual format. “Somewhere west of Chicago, whizzing along a country road towards our perturbed Pacific coast in a high powered motor car, thoroughly equipped with pup tents, pork and beans, and other necessaries in the life of up to date ardent campers, is the extremely attractive young bridal

couple, Lieut. and Mrs. Miles Cowles.”

They “are devoted to the great out of doors and the joys of roughing it,” the Tribune wrote in explaining the surprising honeymoon choice.

One Lake Forest couple didn’t have to look very far to find their other halves. Chicago’s wealthy were a finite group with a restricted habitat.

The Madeleine Childs-William Allan Pinkerton Pullman engagement “elicits many ‘I told you so’s,’ ” the Tribune reported, “for society has been expecting the announcement for many moons.”

Tribune readers, however, might have been puzzled by a photo that accompanied the story of Childs and Pullman’s marriage in July 1925. Why didn’t the photographer wait until their faces lit up with the sense of joy traditionally expressed in wedding portraits?

An axiom by F. Scott Fitzgerald

suggests that the couple wanted to be seen just as they were: utterly bored. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” said Fitzgerald, the novelist chronicler of the Jazz Age. “They are different from you and me.”

CHICAGO HERALD AND EXAMINER The wedding of Madeleine Childs and William Allan Pinkerton Pullman in Lake Forest on July 1, 1925.“After the ceremony, the guests followed the bridal party across the road to the spacious Childs residence, where the bride and bridegroom, and their parents, Mr. and Mrs. C. Frederick Childs, and Mrs. William C. Pullman, received. Supper was served from tables under a gay striped canopy, at little tables under the trees. The broad lawn surrounding the house was bordered with a bright tinted garden and peonies, and lillies floated on the sunken pool.”

CHICAGO TRIBUNE HISTORICAL PHOTO Guests throw rice on sisters Nora and Norma Neisler and their husbands after they were married in a double wedding ceremony at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Chicago on Sept. 4, 1948. The double ring ceremony was performed for the couples who are: Mr. and Mrs. William Clements (Nora Neisler), left, and Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Ellery (Norma Neisler), Sept. 4, 1948.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE Hempstead and Mary Washburne were married Sept. 10, 1921, at the summer residence of the bride’s parents in Winnetka. The morning wedding was planned for the garden followed by a breakfast served at the house: “About 250 persons witnessed the ceremony which made Miss Dennehy the wife of her childhood playmate.”

CHICAGO TRIBUNE HISTORICAL PHOTO Bride and groom Marie De Maesschalek and Joseph Sophie are married by the village registrar Jacques Sandeel in the Belgian Village at A Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, circa June 1934.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE HISTORICAL PHOTO Anne Kales on the day of her wedding to Lt. Miles Cowles on June 27, 1925, in Chicago. Kales was the daughter of“one of Chicago’s most able lawyers, the late Albert Kales,”wrote the Tribune.