March 26, 2025 • 47 mins
On August 26, 1965, LBJ issued a surprise executive order eliminating marriage as grounds for deferment from the Vietnam draft. The announcement set off a panic across the country. The problem was, nearly every state required blood tests or a waiting period — every state, that is, except Nevada. If you could somehow convince someone to marry you, get to Nevada, and get hitched before midnight, you'd be in the clear. Which is exactly what thousands of young people tried to do that day.
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Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English
Written by Dave Roos
Produced by Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design by Chris Childs
Mixing and Mastering by Chris Childs
Additional Editing by Mary Dooe
Fact-Checking by Austin Thompson
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
Very Special thanks to the talented filmmaker Ashton Avila, who shared her invaluable research and contacts from making her short film "I Got You Babe." Go check it out!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
The originals. This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
The Clark County Marriage Licensed Bureau in Las Vegas is
about as far from the glitz and glamour of the
Strip as you can get. But for one night in
nineteen sixty five, this blanned government office in the County
Courthouse was home to one of the wildest shows in town.
(00:39):
On Thursday August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five, hundreds of
young couples from all over the United States flocked to
Las Vegas, desperate to get married before the clock struck midnight.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Why the rush?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Just hours earlier, President's Lyndon Johnson issued a surprise executive order.
With the war escalating in Vietnam, the army needed more soldiers.
Lbj's executive order said that as of midnight, you would
no longer get special treatment for the Vietnam draft by
getting married. The surprise announcement set off a panic. Getting
(01:20):
drafted in nineteen sixty five was seen as a straight
shot to the front lines in Vietnam, but there was
still hope. If you could somehow get married before midnight
local time, you might be in the clear. The problem
was finding a place to get hitched on such short notice.
(01:41):
Nearly every state required blood tests or a waiting period
between getting a marriage license and actually getting married. Every state,
that is, except Nevada. At nine thirty pm on August
twenty sixth, Justice of the Piece James Brennan, returned from
(02:02):
conducting a late night wedding at the Dunes Hotel to
find a mob scene at the Clark County Courthouse. There
was a long, snaking line of fifty couples waiting to
get married, and the crowd was growing fast. Most of
the brides and grooms to be came from California, but
(02:24):
some couples had flown all the way from New Jersey,
New York, and Pennsylvania, frazzled parents in tow. Judge Brennan
had never seen anything like it. On a normal Thursday,
his office might issue eight or ten marriage licenses, But
over the next couple of hours, in what can only
(02:45):
be described as quote an orgy of officiating, Brennan and
his harried clerks issued more than one hundred and fifty licenses.
The judge personally presided over sixty seven weddings in one
hour and fifty minutes, which must be some kind of record.
With minutes to go before midnight and ordered his secretary
(03:08):
to put her typewriter cover over the clock. He didn't
want to know if the last few I dos were
exchanged before or after twelve. As far as the state
of Nevada was concerned, everyone got married on August twenty sixth.
The Vietnam Era was an incredibly stressful time to be
(03:29):
young in America. If you were nineteen or twenty, it
didn't matter what your plans were, getting a job, starting
a family. A draft board could send you halfway around
the world to fight, and you might never come home.
It was stressful for young women too. Imagine you're an
eighteen year old girl fresh out of high school and
(03:50):
your boyfriend calls out of the blue and says, marry
me tonight, or they're going to send me to Vietnam.
What would you do? Would you set aside your own
plans and dreams to protect someone you love. Welcome back
to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host,
(04:14):
Danish Schwartz, and this is Night of one thousand Weddings.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
We are back. She's Danish Schwartz, He's Aaron Burnett, I'm
Jason English. This is the very Special Episodes podcast. How's
everybody doing doing well? How about y'all?
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I'm doing good.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Have we spoken since we had a new addition to
the very special episodes Family.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
No, we have not.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Please introduce. Introduce.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
There's a little baby. There's an Arthur Carmel. So if
you hear any crying in the background, it's the co
host who's mad that he doesn't get a chance to
participate in this banter.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
We're going to write some baby vo parts into some
of these episodes. Put us in touch with his reps.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
We do live in La so he does already have
an agent, manager, talent agent, modeling wrap.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
By the way, great name, great name for his future career.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Artie Karns.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yes, I love it.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Have you gotten all this social media handles and everything
that you need to reserve?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
I think I did. I couldn't get the Gmail, but
I got something close. Isn't that crazy that that's how
fast it is. I think as soon as we landed
on the name, I was like, Instagram, Gmail, It's the
best gift I'll ever give him.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
I got the Gmail. I'm squatting on the Gmail to
the thirteenth birthday President.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
You are a man now.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Perfect. Speaking of La, Saren and I just met up
for a couple of days in La. We made a
start in Venice at a I guess you call it
a creator space called the Lighthouse, and Saren and I
gave a nice talk to a very cool group of people.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Great crowd.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Hopefully they'll have us back. Hopefully we picked up some
new listeners to this podcast.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Yeah, I really liked that crowd. I was going down there.
I used to live in Venice. It was a nice homecoming,
but that crowd was amazing. I wish they had spaces like.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
That when I lived there.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Speaking of big cross country trips, we've got a few
of them in this episode.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Oh God, a frantic road trip to save someone's life.
Pretty much, most of us have no idea what it's
like to live under the shadow of the draft, that
any day a letter could show up in the mail
ordering you to report for duty. For most people, getting
(06:22):
shot at in a foreign country isn't on their bucket list.
For the first few years of the conflict in Vietnam,
only small numbers of American troops were needed, but that
changed in nineteen sixty four following reports of North Vietnamese
torpedo boats attacking an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin.
(06:45):
In response, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing
the President to send conventional troops into Vietnam. The Draft
was designed to most efficiently distribute America's manpower. Every American
man between the ages of eighteen and twenty six was
(07:06):
eligible for the Draft. Not everyone was sent overseas to fight, though.
There were all sorts of built in deferments available ways
to legally get a reprieve. If you were in college,
for example, you could get a student deferment. If you
were a doctor or a farmer, you could get an
occupational or agricultural deferment. If you had kids to raise,
(07:31):
you could get a hardship deferment.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
The whole purpose of the deferments in general, right, is
to create a system of selective service. That's what selective
service means. So some men are needed more in uniform,
and some men are needed more as civilians, or at
least needed less in uniform. That's true across the board
in US history.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
That's Amy Ruttenberg, a historian who researches and writes about
the Draft. Amy's also really interested in all of the
ways that people tried to get around the draft, legal
and otherwise.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Well.
Speaker 5 (08:07):
There are all kinds of stories that circulated about people
going to Mexico to have knee surgery to ruin their
knees rather than fix them, People purposefully starving themselves to
get under the weight limit so that they would be
for f or not eligible physically, people refusing to shower
(08:29):
for weeks leading up to their induction exams so that
they would be found mentally unfit.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
According to one study, more than sixty percent of draft
eligible men actively took some type of measure to avoid
being drafted, or at least to avoid being sent to
the front lines. Army infantry was the most dangerous job,
so a lot of men enlisted in other branches of
the military that had lower odds of being sent to Vietnam,
(08:59):
like the National Guard or even the Navy. Others did
everything they could to qualify for a deferment, which were
relatively easy to get at first, but as the fighting
escalated and the army needed more men, the rules started
to tighten up.
Speaker 5 (09:17):
There's a pattern that's established through all the wars where
the United States has used a draft, and that is
at the outset, when there are relatively high rates of volunteering,
or when the US hasn't needed quite as many men
in uniform, the deferments are pretty easy to get. And
then as it becomes harder to get people to enlist
(09:38):
or the military simply needs more men, those deferments get
closed off one by one.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
That's what happened in nineteen sixty five. Two years earlier,
John F. Kennedy had signed an executive order saying that
married men would be drafted last, only after all eligible
single men were used up. Kennedy's announcement even triggered a
miniature marriage boom.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
Marriage rates were seven point five percent hire for twenty
year olds and ten point nine percent higher for twenty
one year olds between October sixty three and June sixty
four than they had been during the previous two years.
In other words, there's a spike in twenty and twenty
one year olds getting married.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
With the marriage deferment. If a young person really didn't
want to fight in Vietnam, they didn't have to starve
themselves or go to Mexico and get reverse knee surgery.
They just had to find a woman. At least that
was the case until August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 6 (10:43):
I was going to work one night, and I worked
a late afternoon shift at the phone company, and I
heard on the radio that Lyndon Johnson had changed the
rules for getting a deferment and that you had to
be married before midnight that night.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
That's Candy Rydell. In nineteen sixty five, Candy was an
eighteen year old student at El Camino Junior College in
southern California. Candy was dating a guy named George Warren.
George was different from most of the other guys at
El Camino. He was an intellectual, a free thinker. George
(11:16):
didn't approve of Candy being in a sorority, too conventional,
too bourgeois, so they started going to anti war protests instead.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
I remember my mother was horrified because she had long hair,
which wasn't long hair at all.
Speaker 7 (11:31):
You know.
Speaker 6 (11:32):
It was just like he could combit and it came
to his bottom of his ear, you know.
Speaker 7 (11:37):
But she never liked anybody that was with.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
George had his whole life planned out, and central to
that plan was not getting sent to Vietnam.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
That was his life, you know. He was a student
and an anthropologist student, so that had a big future.
And he figured that he would go to school and
then go to graduate school, and then go on to
get a doctorate, and then by the time he was
twenty eight, he would have to get married just to
avoid the draft.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Candy and George had only been dating for three months.
They never talked about marriage, or if they had, it
was something in the way distant future. But when Candy
heard lbj's announcement on the radio, she felt her world
turn upside down. If the marriage deferment was gone, what
(12:22):
if the college deferment was next, what would stop George
from being drafted. The second Candy got to work, she
called George's house and left a message with his mom.
She said that she would do whatever he wanted, whatever
was necessary to keep him safe.
Speaker 6 (12:40):
After a couple of hours, I got a phone call
that said there was an emergency that I had to
go home. I remember telling the girl next to me,
I think I'm getting married.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
So as it happens, Candy wasn't the only young woman
in southern California getting an urgent phone call in the
middle of the afternoon. Eighteen year old Claudia was working
as a bookkeeper at the Jolly Roger Inn near Disneyland
when her boyfriend David called out of the blue.
Speaker 8 (13:07):
So Claudia is at work, she gets a phone call
from David saying, Hey, there's this executive order that was issued.
We need to get married.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That's Ashton Avila, a filmmaker. Ashton made a short film
called I Got You Babe. That's a fictionalized account of
Claudia and David's adventures that night in nineteen sixty five.
Ashton says that Claudia was in the same boat as Candy.
She'd only started dating David that summer, and suddenly she
(13:37):
was faced with a huge decision. Sensing Claudia's hesitation, David
pushed harder. So you don't love me, he asked. Claudia,
you just want me to die over in Vietnam. Of
course she loved him, and of course she didn't want
him to die anywhere. She just needed a minute to think.
(13:58):
But David said if they wanted to get married before midnight,
they had to leave right now.
Speaker 8 (14:04):
After the announcement, people realized the old only place in
the US that you could get married without a blood
test or a waiting period was the State of Nevada.
So people all over the country who knew that they
wanted to make it in for this draft deferment fled
to Nevada.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
David's friend had a car and the plan was to
drive to Vegas, which was at least five hours away.
Completely overwhelmed, Claudia tried to explain the situation to her boss,
who was less than sympathetic. He was from the World
War II generation and had strong feelings about so called
draft dodgers.
Speaker 8 (14:44):
She said, I need to go because I need to
go and get married, and he said, well, if you leave,
don't bother coming back, because you don't have a job
here anymore.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
As if Claudia's decision wasn't hard enough now her job
was on the line, but there wasn't time to think.
David needed her help, and that's all she knew.
Speaker 8 (15:01):
She left the job. They went to get married. They
got in their friend's car and they started driving towards
life Las Vegas.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Candy and George also had their sights set on Vegas,
but they bought plane tickets. Actually, George's mom bought the
plane tickets. She was dead set on getting George married
before midnight and keeping him out of harm's way.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
When Candy and.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
George got to the airport, it was full of other
young couples with the same determined and slightly dazed look
in their eye.
Speaker 6 (15:32):
It was Bonanza Airlines and they had to put on
three extra airplanes because there were so many couples going
to Las Vegas right then to get married.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
So that was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
For Amy Ruttenberg, the historian, hearing about these young couples
dropping everything and racing to Vegas drives home just how
anxious this entire generation was about being drafted.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Well, it certainly shows how serious these couples were about
avoiding this. I mean, if the news drops and within
twenty four hours you're on a plane to Las Vegas
in nineteen sixty five, right, that's pretty serious.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
When we asked Candy if she had any second thoughts
as she was boarding a Bonanza Airlines flight to Vegas
to marry a guy she'd only known for three months,
she said no.
Speaker 6 (16:19):
There wasn't any hesitation. It was just like, well, this
is something we have to do. It's different, but let's
do it, you know, So I didn't worry. I called
my mother before I left, and she said, are you pregnant,
because that's my mother.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Claudia, on the other hand, wasn't convinced. The long car
ride to Vegas gave her way too much time to think.
David's friend brought his fiance, and the other couple bickered
and fought in the front seat the entire trip. How
did Claudia know that she and David wouldn't end up
like them? Was she really ready to be somebody's wife?
Speaker 8 (17:01):
I think she was torn between She really, you know,
loved David and she wanted to be with him, and
she didn't want him to go to war. Like obviously
she said yes for a reason, but I think she
also was battling with the idea of what does it
mean to be a woman in nineteen sixty five and
what does it mean to get married and have your
(17:21):
life change it that way? And the expectations of you
as a wife and a mother, And then all of
a sudden it's like, hey, you have, you know, six
hours to decide if you were going to give all
that up.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
As Claudia, David, Candy, and George set off for Vegas,
they had two burning questions racing through their minds. One,
would they actually make it to Vegas on time to
get married by midnight, and two was all of this
completely crazy. On August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five, Larry
(18:03):
Fugate was a twenty year old cub reporter for the
Las Vegas Review Journal, the city paper. It was close
to nine pm on a Thursday and the journal office
was almost empty. Then the phone rang.
Speaker 8 (18:16):
And he gets this phone call that somebody says, Hey,
there's something going on at the courthouse. And Larry says
to like one of the last reporters there, being like, hey,
there's something going on at the courthouse that maybe we
should go and look into. And they were like, I'm
going home. If you want to go do.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That, you can.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
So Larry, being an eager beaver, grabbed his notebook and
high tailed it for the courthouse. He couldn't believe what
he saw. There were people everywhere. Police were on duty
trying to control the increasingly jittery crowd. When Larry realized
that people had flown to Vegas from all over the
country for a last minute draft reprieve, he knew that
(18:57):
he'd stumbled on the best story in Vegas that night.
Speaker 8 (19:01):
I remember him describing he goes there were women with
soda pop cans in their hair, the curling and he goes,
and men who look like they walked off a construction site.
And it was just this kind of chaotic group of people.
And he went and he interviewed a bunch of the
people there.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
There was a tall young man who'd flown all the
way from Pittsburgh with his sweetheart and his parents. He
admitted that he'd only known his future wife for four weeks,
but said they'd discussed marriage before. Once emotions were running high.
Most of the young women were either giddy or in
(19:39):
tears or both. The young men paced around chain smoking cigarettes.
One twenty year old kid told Larry quote, sure, I'm
not ready to be married, but I'm not going to
fight in some dirty jungle. The parents were on edge too.
When Larry tried to interview one father, he was shouted away.
(20:00):
The man didn't want his son's name in the papers
as a quote. Draft Dodger.
Speaker 8 (20:06):
Did have their opinions of what was right and what
was wrong. And also, you know, we were closer to
that World War II victory right where America was the
big hero and you know, or one of the big heroes,
and you know, the pride of being like, you know,
you fought the Nazis, you like, did good for the world,
all of that, and then to go into this war
(20:27):
that was so muddy about the intention of it, and
to have those veterans from World War Two be like,
you fight for your country, We're proud to be American,
all this stuff, and then to have this war that's like, wait,
this isn't the same situation, But how do I explain
that to an older generation.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
One of the Clark County police officers turned to larry
and equipped. It seems romance is now spelled v I
e T NAM. Inside the marriage license bureau, things were
getting chaotic. Lydia Cartwright was on duty that night. She
remembers getting frantic phone calls from all over the country.
(21:07):
Men were calling from New York in Chicago asking Lydia
to marry them right over the phone. She politely declined.
Most of the couples didn't have wedding rings, and none
of the girls wore wedding dresses. Someone showed up with
a veil and several of the brides passed it around,
recycling it for their rushed ceremony with the Justice of
(21:28):
the Peace Meanwhile, more and more couples were arriving in
Vegas by plane and by car, trying to beat the
midnight deadline.
Speaker 8 (21:38):
The feeling of Las Vegas that night was cars were
driving down the boulevard and people were yelling at the
cars and saying, the courthouse is that way, Like people
in the streets were pointing them in the direction because
they knew what everyone was doing.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Candy Riddell and George Warren landed in Las Vegas around
nine thirty. They had no idea if the courthouse was
even open. They jumped in a taxi and the driver
insisted on stopping at every single quickie, wea chapel along
the strip.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
They must have had a deal with them, you know
that he's tried to sell people on the way, and
we had to get out and go into some of them,
and we're just panicky, you know. We got to get
to the We got to get to the courthouse. And
then when you get to the courthouse it was closed.
They had to close for an hour to take lunch.
This was like at ten o'clock at night, though, you know,
so they were preparing for a big influx and then
(22:29):
so there was just jam a hallway jammed of people
waiting for the courthouse.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
To open again.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
I think it's just that we were all nervous that
we were going to get married in time.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Candy and George didn't know it, but they were some
of the lucky ones. All across America, thousands of other
couples like them were frantically trying to get married too,
but with little luck. In Elkton, Maryland, for example, which
at one time was the most popular marriage mill on
the East Coast, police and city officials fielded hundreds of
(23:01):
phone calls. They tried to explain that Maryland outlawed quickie
marriages years ago, but that didn't stop throngs of young
couples for making the late night drive. Elkton police told
newspapers that out of state couples quote ran around like
a bunch of ninnies trying to circumvent the forty eight
hour waiting period. They even tracked down a local judge
(23:25):
who had the authority to waive the waiting period, but
only it turned out if one of the parties was
a Maryland resident. At the night court in New York City,
a rush of young couples begged the judge to marry
them before midnight, but he sent them packing. In Texas,
a reporter caught up to a nineteen year old couple
(23:47):
who were turned away from a county clerk's office because
of the three day waiting period. The dejected young man
accused the reporter of being a spy for the draft board, saying, quote,
if I give you my name, I'd be drafted in
the morning. Nevada was one of the only places left
in the country where a quick wedding was legal, but
(24:08):
the window was closing there too. Back in Vegas, Candy
and George made it to the front of the line
around eleven o'clock. They got their marriage license and then
had to wait in another anxious line for the Justice
of the Peace. Judge Brennan, performed a short ceremony in
his office, but Candy says it was all a blur.
(24:31):
She doesn't remember a word. Before she knew it, she
and George were back out on the streets of Las Vegas,
two newly weds.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
Well, it was just not my intention to have a wedding,
you know, I wasn't I never thought about being a bride.
You know, if it happened one day, it would happen,
so it was all still a kind of a swirling around, and.
Speaker 7 (24:50):
It was just I don't know.
Speaker 6 (24:52):
We were just in a daze.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
I think for a long time.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Claudia and David had an even wilder ride. They drove
all the way from la but it took longer than
they thought. The whole drive, Claudia was going back and
forth in her mind, should she do this? Was she crazy?
She decided to let fate decide. If we don't make
it by twelve, that design that you wasn't supposed to
(25:14):
marry David. They pulled up to the courthouse at exactly
the stroke of midnight.
Speaker 8 (25:20):
They were like, we're not going to make it. We're
not going to make it, and the car pulls up,
they get out of the car, they run, and as
they're going to the entrance to the courthouse, people are
leaving the courthouse in tears and they're crying and they're upset,
and they say, what's going on, and they say, we
didn't make it in time. It's too late. We didn't
make it in time. And Claudia is like, well, that's it,
we didn't make it in time, and David says, no,
(25:42):
if they're going to tell me. No, They're going to
tell me to my face.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Ashton admits that this next part sounds like a scene
from a cheesy movie, but she swears that it's true.
Speaker 8 (25:52):
So they get to the door and the woman is
literally putting like the padlock, like locking the door, and
he tells her, I don't want to go to Vietnam.
I don't want to die like I need to get
married tonight, and she just took pity on him and
let the two of them in, and they were the
last people to be married in Clark County that night.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Judge Brennan didn't leave the Clark County Courthouse until after
two am. Too wired to sleep, he went for a
beer at the back bar of the Horseshoe Casino. George's
mom booked Candy and him a room at the Sands Hotel,
but Claudia and David didn't have anywhere to go after
their midnight wedding. They wandered into an old school casino
(26:36):
called Diamond Jim's Nevada Club, and Claudia dropped a nickel
into one of the slot machines. Ding ding went the
lights and out poured twenty dollars in change enough to
afford a low budget honeymoon at the Hacienda Hotel and Casino.
Speaker 8 (26:53):
They got married and they stayed in a hotel that night,
But it was also kind of a very somber feeling
of what did we just do? I imagine it's like that
moment in the Graduate where they're sitting in the back
of the bus and they have to realize, oh shit,
oh what just happened.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Less than twelve hours ago, Claudia and David were just
two kids living in Anaheim, with no real plans for
the future. Now they were two married people with no
real plans for the future. All they knew was that
David was safe for now, at least. We read a
lot of old newspaper articles while researching the craziness of
(27:31):
August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five. There was Larry Fugate's
story for the Las Vegas Review Journal, of course, but
every major newspaper in the country also ran an article
about the midnight marriage madness. Of all the wedding stories
we read, though one stood out as the most improbable
(27:53):
and perhaps the most magical of them all. The details
were first reported in the Saint Joseph Gazette, in Saint Joseph, Missouri.
But to tell it, we need to take you back
to that fateful night when everything changed for one young couple.
(28:20):
Dan and Nancy Wilson started dating in nineteen sixty two.
Dan was a senior at Benton High School in Saint Joseph, Missouri,
and Nancy was a freshman.
Speaker 7 (28:30):
Well, actually, we've known each other almost all of our life.
We grew up only about a block and a half
away from each other, and so there was a few
years of difference between us in age, so I was
always ahead of her, And it wasn't until the teenage
years that I finally started noticing this pretty little girl
down the street and she caught my eye, and thanks
(28:52):
kind of took off from there.
Speaker 9 (28:54):
Well, we'd kind of been noticing each other in school,
and then during the summer spent a little time over
the swimming pool and happened to notice him there, And
one weekend we went to a county fair and he
asked me if I would like to have a ride
home with him, and been together pretty much ever since then.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
By the time Nancy graduated, Dan already had the rest
of their lives planned out. They'd own a funeral home.
Of course, let me explain. After high school, Dan attended
community college and got a part time job at a
local funeral home, and.
Speaker 7 (29:30):
The gentleman that owned the funeral home came to him
and said, you know, I got this funeral home, but
I have three daughters and none of them have any
interest in the business. So for the right young man,
if you want to get your license, come back and
work here at the funeral home. There could be a
bright future.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Dan was all in, but to take over the business,
he had to attend mortuary school first and get his
mortuary license. Dan and Nancy were deeply committed to each other,
but to realize their bright future as funeral home owners,
they'd have to spend a whole year apart mortuary school
(30:07):
in Dallas, Texas, five hundred and fifty miles from Saint Joseph.
Being a part would be hard for the young lovebirds,
but during Christmas break in nineteen sixty four, Dan made
it official. He asked Nancy to marry him, and she
said yes, of course. They set a date for September fourth,
(30:28):
nineteen sixty five, exactly a week after Dan would graduate.
Everything was falling into place. Dan went back to Dallas.
Nancy stayed in Saint Joseph, and they dreamed of their
September wedding.
Speaker 7 (30:42):
The plan was to get married at our church whenever
got back home. Invitations were out, just immediate family, her
family and mine, just a small we'll get together, and
everything was all set out and we were looking forward
to that.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Dan says he didn't think much about the draft at
the time. He knew kids from high school who were
serving in Vietnam, and he didn't have anything against the war.
In fact, Dan says he would have been proud to
serve his country, but all he was thinking about in
nineteen sixty five was finishing school, getting that mortuary license,
(31:17):
and marrying his sweetheart. Then came August twenty sixth LBJ
signed the executive order saying that after midnight the marriage
to Ferment was going away. Dan heard the news about
the rule change around five PM, but he didn't really
see how it affected him. It wasn't until later that
(31:39):
night that some of Dan's classmates from Missouri gave him
something to worry about. If any of them were drafted
right out of mortuary school, they were up a creek. Apparently,
the licensing process in Missouri followed a strict timeline. After
you got your mortuary degree, there was a one year preceptorship,
(32:01):
and then you took the state boards. If Dan and
his friends were sent to Vietnam, the process could be
delayed for years, or they might even have to repeat
mortuary school when they got back.
Speaker 7 (32:13):
And we thought that was a tremendous waste of time
and money. And I had already borrowed the mighty to
go to school to start with the first time. So
I was on a pretty tight time frame anyway already,
and we were looking to get married, so I didn't
need anything that might potentially interrupt me completing my preceptorship,
passing my state boards, and then getting license. So we're
having this discussion with my classmates, and I decided that
(32:37):
this may be an issue here for us in the
state of Missouri if we don't follow through on a
time frame.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
What's crazy was that Dan and Nancy were all set
to get married in a little over a week. They
even had their marriage license already. The fact that lbj's
announcement came when it did during the extremely narrow window
between the end of school and marriage too perfectly legit
(33:04):
draft deferments was wild. Now Dan and Nancy's entire plan
was in jeopardy. But what could they do about it.
Speaker 7 (33:13):
One of the guys suggested, well, you know, you guys
have already got your license and everything. You could go
ahead and get married over the phone, and then we
could you school from there and have your church wedding later. Well,
we all laughed about that and thought it was funny,
and then we pondered it a little longer.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Wait a second, could that actually work? Can two people
really get married over the phone? He needed to talk
to Nancy. It was now ten thirty pm, ninety minutes
until midnight. Nancy, it turned out, was at a bridal shower,
her bridal shower when Dan called in the middle of
(33:51):
her party, yapping about a telephone wedding. She thought he
was kidding, But after Dan explained everything, Nancy had no choice.
She was on board.
Speaker 7 (34:03):
Well, we had to find out first of all if
it was legal and what could be done about it.
And eventually we got to a magistrate judge in Saint Joe, Missouri,
Margaret Young was her name, and she said, yes, it's.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Legal, but there was a catch.
Speaker 7 (34:18):
You'll have to have the parties together. She said, I'll
have to be with Nancy and You'll need to be
hooked up in Dallas with some officient in Dallas. Well,
I'm thinking, okay, Margaret Young, the judge is on a phone,
Nancy's on a phone, the minister in Dallas is on
a phone, and I'm on a phone. Now we got
a four way conference call. Let's make it happen. And
(34:40):
so we started moving to that direction. And now we're
talking about it's getting ten thirty eleven o'clock at nine,
so sneaking up on that midnight hour. And Margaret Young says, no, no, no, Dan,
you have to be in the presence of the minister.
You can't just be on the phone. And I have
to be in the presence of Nancy.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
So let's get this straight. If Dan and Nancy were
going to pull this off, if they were really going
to get married by telephone from different states, Dan had
to find a minister in Dallas.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Like now.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Dan and his friends grabbed the Yellow Pages, flipped to
the church's section, and started making phone calls. At eleven
fifteen pm, someone finally picked up doctor G. N. Goldstin,
Associate pastor of the East Dallas Christian Church was in
the shower when he fielded Dan's random call.
Speaker 7 (35:37):
I said, here's our situation, here's what we'd like to do,
and I went through the whole background. I said, we
have a judge at the other end who says this
will be legallet but we need an efficient here. I
explained the story, and he was compassionate and understanding. He said, okay,
I help you out.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Dan and his three friends jumped in a car and
raced to doctor Goldstein's house.
Speaker 7 (35:59):
We had to scurry across Dallas to get to the minister,
and by this it's now getting late at night, and
the minister that we were talking to, he was in
his pajamas when he answered the door.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Meanwhile, back in Saint Joseph, Nancy's bridal shower was quickly
being converted into a wedding. The bridesmaids snapped into action.
Speaker 10 (36:21):
One of the girls her parents owned a floor's shop,
so that's how we were able to get a bouquet
at the last minute, and they grabbed my dress and
it's just kind of chaos. They're all changing my clothes
and making the bouquet, and somehow it all worked out.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
At eleven thirty eight pm, Nancy stood in her parents'
kitchen in Saint Joseph, wearing her beautiful white wedding dress,
bouquet in one hand, phone receiver in the other. One
of Nancy's bridesmaids held up a framed photo of Dan
so they'd feel a little closer to each other. Magistrate
Margaret Young was in an upstairs bedroom with Nancy's pa parents,
(37:07):
officiating from a separate line two states away in Dallas.
Dan said, I do witnessed as law required by an
ordained stranger. In pajamas, Dan and Nancy made the midnight
deadline with a few minutes to spare. As a wedding present.
Dan's friend Jerry offered to pay doctor Goldstin for the
(37:30):
long distance charges. It was thirteen dollars. Only when Dan
hung up the phone did it hit him. He was
finally married to his favorite girl, but she was five
hundred and fifty miles away.
Speaker 7 (37:45):
It was not at all what I had anticipated my
wedding night was going to be. I'm going home by myself.
You know, That's not when it's supposed to be. But
the last thing that we said to each other, and
whenever we finished the phone call was I'll see you
in two days, because two days later it was going
to be graduation and she was coming.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
To Dallas later, the long distance newlyweds finally shared a
first kiss and set off on their life together. As
it turned out, the whole mortuary school thing was a bust.
The older couple who owned the funeral home decided not
to retire after all. Dan switched to a marketing career
(38:26):
and never looked back. This August, Dan and Nancy Wilson
will celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary.
Speaker 10 (38:34):
Yeah, it's a long time in it. I've let him
live that long.
Speaker 7 (38:42):
We are both so blessed and that we have each other.
And somehow we knew from the very beginning that we
were met for each other. It's just just so we've
always been together. We don't know any different. We love
each other, we cherish each other time together, So it's
all good. It's all good.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
By one estimate, twenty thousand couples got married on August
twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five. Not all of them ended
as happily as Dan and Nancy's. Candy and George stayed
together for five years. They moved to Eugene Oregon, so
George could attend graduate school within a day's drive of
(39:25):
the Canadian border. He never did get over that draft thing.
In nineteen seventy, George fell in love with a woman
he met in Mexico, and he and Candy divorced, no
hard feelings. Candy says they remained good friends until George
passed away in twenty eighteen. Does she regret marrying George
(39:46):
so suddenly in nineteen sixty five, would she have done
anything differently?
Speaker 7 (39:51):
No?
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I think I did the right thing.
Speaker 6 (39:52):
He had definite desires to avoid being in the service
at that time, you know, and I believed in him,
and you know we were in love. You know, you
do stuff then, right?
Speaker 2 (40:02):
What about Claudia and David, Well, they almost didn't make
it either. Claudia's family was so ashamed that she'd married
a quote draft dodger that they told her not to
tell anyone. Two days later, Claudia had to attend her
cousin's wedding.
Speaker 8 (40:20):
And as she was walking her down the aisle, no
one knew that Claudia was married, and she was crying
and she goes and I'm sure it was interpreted as
tears of joy for this wedding, but I was crying
because I was watching her have the wedding I was
never going to get to have, which was very, very heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Claudia and David tried to make it work though they
had two kids together, but after six years they split up.
That was nineteen seventy one. Fast forward to twenty eleven.
Because they had kids together, Claudia and David never completely
left each other's lives. In twenty eleven, their first great
(41:00):
grandson was born in San Diego. Claudia and David made
the drive down from La together and got to talking.
David told Claudia that even after forty years, he never
stopped loving her. Two months later they were remarried, but
not in Vegas this time. When Ashton Avila was making
(41:22):
her short film based on Claudia and David's story, she
worried that Claudia's character would come across as weak. Clearly
she wasn't ready to marry David that day in nineteen
sixty five, but she did it anyway.
Speaker 8 (41:36):
I think there are different looks of what strength is
for women, and that was a huge discussion we had
when we were working on the film. Was at the end,
would a strong woman walk away and not get married
because she knows that she wants her own life, or
would a strong woman sacrifice what she wants to save
(41:59):
the life of somebody else? And I think that there's
strength in both of those options.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Like thousands of other couples, lives took an unexpected turn
on August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five, Claudia decided to
stand by David's side sixty years ago, and she's still
there today. Happy sixtieth anniversary to all the gray haired
couples out there who have LBJ to think or to
(42:27):
blame for sending them scrambling to the altar all those
years ago. You've shown us that there's truly no limit
to the things we'll do for love.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
So we often say about these episodes that you know,
this should be a movie, but I really mean it
with this one. I think there's some real juicy roles
for a lot of nice ensemble in this. Saren is
our resident casting director. Did you happen to cast this one?
Speaker 4 (42:55):
I got to completely agree with you that this is
film ready, Like Hollywood, take note. So here's just some
casting suggestions. I started with the twenty something cub reporter
from the Las Vegas Review Journal who was bouncing around
that night covering everybody. I thought, for him, you wanted
somebody fun, but yes, also somebody who feels like a journalist.
So I picked Noah Sentino, that guy from the Netflix
spy show The Recruit.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
He's kind of a floppy haired kid.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
I know him from the Netflix series To all the
boys I loved before.
Speaker 4 (43:21):
Yes, there you go. Of course I should have mentioned
that one. Yes, I thought he'd be good. And then
so for the couples, I went with like, I wanted
people who felt like the time period. I wanted them
to have kind of like, you know, not Internet faces.
So I went for Candy and George, the couple who
flew on Bonanza Airlines. I went with Haley Stanfield for
Candy and Finn Cole for George. Finn Cole, if you
(43:43):
don't know him, he played Michael Gray, Polly's son from
Peaky Blinders.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Yeah, you know who I was kind of picturing as
one of the boys, maybe just because he had like
a minor part in Oppenheimer was Jack Quaid.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Oh, I like that call.
Speaker 4 (43:56):
I also went with some World War Two era actors
or at least their most recent parts have been that
it picked some guys from Masters of Air. So I
had Austin Butler also aka Elvis. I had him playing David,
and then claw Aaudia, the couple who drove to Las Vegas.
I thought, for Claudia, go with Florence Pugh. I thought
that would be a nice couple. Florence Peugh Austin Butler.
I can imagine them in that car ride, stuck with
the other couple, crying and everything.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So I was like, Okay, now the other one I
picked with.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
The Wilsons, Dan Wilson and Nancy Wilson, not from Heart
the Band. Now Dan Wilson, I went with Callum Turner,
who played Bucky Egan from Masters of War. And then
for Nancy, I went with Sydney Sweeney. I thought they
can nail that as a relationship, and I really loved them.
And then all the details like when she's sitting there
holding up the photo of Dan so she can feel
closer to him at the wedding.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Oh Mike, my heart melted at that.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
And then the fact that the end when they get
back together, Oh my god, I lost it.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
I loved this whole series.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
I'm in the fandango app trying to get tickets already.
Speaker 4 (44:51):
Yes, oh my god, Yes, did you guys have any
very special characters you pulled from the step?
Speaker 3 (44:55):
So I didn't want to play favorites with any of
the actual couples, So I'm trying to pick from the
people who helped them along their way. So whether it's
the judge in Missouri and the minister in Texas, maybe
they could share the honor the secretary who covered the
clock with her typewriting cover. That's that's great, But I'm
going to give it to the fast thinking people of
(45:15):
Bonanza Airlines who in real time were able to decide
we need more flights. Can you imagine that today? Like
you're at an airport and someone just decides that, yes,
we got a lot of people going to Vegas for
some reason, get the other planes out of the hangar
a different time.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
I'm telling you, what about you, Dana, did you have one?
Speaker 2 (45:32):
I think it is the secretary for me because I
can imagine that scene in the movie when she goes
midnight not on my time.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
Yeah, I loved that lady from the Clark County Courthouse
who undoes the lock. So they can go in and
get married. I just love the image of her undoing
the lock. I was like, yeah, she's like out there
pad locking in the courthouse and she's like, okay, I'll
let you and last ones to get married in the
night of a thousand weddings.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
A lot of civil disobedience on display here.
Speaker 4 (46:01):
And I love to took place in Vegas. It felt
so right that it was Vegas. I mean, this couldn't
happen in like Cincinnati. I guess you could, but I
mean this is not the same.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
It's the prequel to Anora that we all want.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Totally very special episodes is made by some very special people.
Today's episode was written by Dave Russ. If you like
this one and you're enjoying the NCAA tournament, go check
out an episode Dave wrote for us last May. It's
called The Shot. It's about the only three point shot
in basketball history that saved thousands of lives. Day Scott
(46:37):
Severn more in the pipeline for this stretch special thanks
to filmmaker Ashton Avila, who shared her invaluable research and
contacts from making her short film I Got You Babe.
Go check that out. This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz,
Zaron Burnett, and Jason English. Our super producer is Josh Fisher.
(46:58):
Editing and sound design by Chris Childs, Mixing and mastering
by Chris Childs. Additional editing by Mary Doo, original music
by Elise McCoy, bactchecking by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson.
Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
(47:19):
You'd like to email the show, hit us up at
Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Our plan is
to have new episodes every Wednesday from now into July,
so we will see you back here next week. Very
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts
The originals. This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
The Clark County Marriage Licensed Bureau in Las Vegas is
about as far from the glitz and glamour of the
Strip as you can get. But for one night in
nineteen sixty five, this blanned government office in the County
Courthouse was home to one of the wildest shows in town.
(00:39):
On Thursday August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five, hundreds of
young couples from all over the United States flocked to
Las Vegas, desperate to get married before the clock struck midnight.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Why the rush?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Just hours earlier, President's Lyndon Johnson issued a surprise executive order.
With the war escalating in Vietnam, the army needed more soldiers.
Lbj's executive order said that as of midnight, you would
no longer get special treatment for the Vietnam draft by
getting married. The surprise announcement set off a panic. Getting
(01:20):
drafted in nineteen sixty five was seen as a straight
shot to the front lines in Vietnam, but there was
still hope. If you could somehow get married before midnight
local time, you might be in the clear. The problem
was finding a place to get hitched on such short notice.
(01:41):
Nearly every state required blood tests or a waiting period
between getting a marriage license and actually getting married. Every state,
that is, except Nevada. At nine thirty pm on August
twenty sixth, Justice of the Piece James Brennan, returned from
(02:02):
conducting a late night wedding at the Dunes Hotel to
find a mob scene at the Clark County Courthouse. There
was a long, snaking line of fifty couples waiting to
get married, and the crowd was growing fast. Most of
the brides and grooms to be came from California, but
(02:24):
some couples had flown all the way from New Jersey,
New York, and Pennsylvania, frazzled parents in tow. Judge Brennan
had never seen anything like it. On a normal Thursday,
his office might issue eight or ten marriage licenses, But
over the next couple of hours, in what can only
(02:45):
be described as quote an orgy of officiating, Brennan and
his harried clerks issued more than one hundred and fifty licenses.
The judge personally presided over sixty seven weddings in one
hour and fifty minutes, which must be some kind of record.
With minutes to go before midnight and ordered his secretary
(03:08):
to put her typewriter cover over the clock. He didn't
want to know if the last few I dos were
exchanged before or after twelve. As far as the state
of Nevada was concerned, everyone got married on August twenty sixth.
The Vietnam Era was an incredibly stressful time to be
(03:29):
young in America. If you were nineteen or twenty, it
didn't matter what your plans were, getting a job, starting
a family. A draft board could send you halfway around
the world to fight, and you might never come home.
It was stressful for young women too. Imagine you're an
eighteen year old girl fresh out of high school and
(03:50):
your boyfriend calls out of the blue and says, marry
me tonight, or they're going to send me to Vietnam.
What would you do? Would you set aside your own
plans and dreams to protect someone you love. Welcome back
to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host,
(04:14):
Danish Schwartz, and this is Night of one thousand Weddings.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
We are back. She's Danish Schwartz, He's Aaron Burnett, I'm
Jason English. This is the very Special Episodes podcast. How's
everybody doing doing well? How about y'all?
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I'm doing good.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Have we spoken since we had a new addition to
the very special episodes Family.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
No, we have not.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Please introduce. Introduce.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
There's a little baby. There's an Arthur Carmel. So if
you hear any crying in the background, it's the co
host who's mad that he doesn't get a chance to
participate in this banter.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
We're going to write some baby vo parts into some
of these episodes. Put us in touch with his reps.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
We do live in La so he does already have
an agent, manager, talent agent, modeling wrap.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
By the way, great name, great name for his future career.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Artie Karns.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yes, I love it.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Have you gotten all this social media handles and everything
that you need to reserve?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
I think I did. I couldn't get the Gmail, but
I got something close. Isn't that crazy that that's how
fast it is. I think as soon as we landed
on the name, I was like, Instagram, Gmail, It's the
best gift I'll ever give him.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
I got the Gmail. I'm squatting on the Gmail to
the thirteenth birthday President.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
You are a man now.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Perfect. Speaking of La, Saren and I just met up
for a couple of days in La. We made a
start in Venice at a I guess you call it
a creator space called the Lighthouse, and Saren and I
gave a nice talk to a very cool group of people.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Great crowd.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Hopefully they'll have us back. Hopefully we picked up some
new listeners to this podcast.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Yeah, I really liked that crowd. I was going down there.
I used to live in Venice. It was a nice homecoming,
but that crowd was amazing. I wish they had spaces like.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
That when I lived there.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Speaking of big cross country trips, we've got a few
of them in this episode.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Oh God, a frantic road trip to save someone's life.
Pretty much, most of us have no idea what it's
like to live under the shadow of the draft, that
any day a letter could show up in the mail
ordering you to report for duty. For most people, getting
(06:22):
shot at in a foreign country isn't on their bucket list.
For the first few years of the conflict in Vietnam,
only small numbers of American troops were needed, but that
changed in nineteen sixty four following reports of North Vietnamese
torpedo boats attacking an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin.
(06:45):
In response, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing
the President to send conventional troops into Vietnam. The Draft
was designed to most efficiently distribute America's manpower. Every American
man between the ages of eighteen and twenty six was
(07:06):
eligible for the Draft. Not everyone was sent overseas to fight, though.
There were all sorts of built in deferments available ways
to legally get a reprieve. If you were in college,
for example, you could get a student deferment. If you
were a doctor or a farmer, you could get an
occupational or agricultural deferment. If you had kids to raise,
(07:31):
you could get a hardship deferment.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
The whole purpose of the deferments in general, right, is
to create a system of selective service. That's what selective
service means. So some men are needed more in uniform,
and some men are needed more as civilians, or at
least needed less in uniform. That's true across the board
in US history.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
That's Amy Ruttenberg, a historian who researches and writes about
the Draft. Amy's also really interested in all of the
ways that people tried to get around the draft, legal
and otherwise.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Well.
Speaker 5 (08:07):
There are all kinds of stories that circulated about people
going to Mexico to have knee surgery to ruin their
knees rather than fix them, People purposefully starving themselves to
get under the weight limit so that they would be
for f or not eligible physically, people refusing to shower
(08:29):
for weeks leading up to their induction exams so that
they would be found mentally unfit.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
According to one study, more than sixty percent of draft
eligible men actively took some type of measure to avoid
being drafted, or at least to avoid being sent to
the front lines. Army infantry was the most dangerous job,
so a lot of men enlisted in other branches of
the military that had lower odds of being sent to Vietnam,
(08:59):
like the National Guard or even the Navy. Others did
everything they could to qualify for a deferment, which were
relatively easy to get at first, but as the fighting
escalated and the army needed more men, the rules started
to tighten up.
Speaker 5 (09:17):
There's a pattern that's established through all the wars where
the United States has used a draft, and that is
at the outset, when there are relatively high rates of volunteering,
or when the US hasn't needed quite as many men
in uniform, the deferments are pretty easy to get. And
then as it becomes harder to get people to enlist
(09:38):
or the military simply needs more men, those deferments get
closed off one by one.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
That's what happened in nineteen sixty five. Two years earlier,
John F. Kennedy had signed an executive order saying that
married men would be drafted last, only after all eligible
single men were used up. Kennedy's announcement even triggered a
miniature marriage boom.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
Marriage rates were seven point five percent hire for twenty
year olds and ten point nine percent higher for twenty
one year olds between October sixty three and June sixty
four than they had been during the previous two years.
In other words, there's a spike in twenty and twenty
one year olds getting married.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
With the marriage deferment. If a young person really didn't
want to fight in Vietnam, they didn't have to starve
themselves or go to Mexico and get reverse knee surgery.
They just had to find a woman. At least that
was the case until August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 6 (10:43):
I was going to work one night, and I worked
a late afternoon shift at the phone company, and I
heard on the radio that Lyndon Johnson had changed the
rules for getting a deferment and that you had to
be married before midnight that night.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
That's Candy Rydell. In nineteen sixty five, Candy was an
eighteen year old student at El Camino Junior College in
southern California. Candy was dating a guy named George Warren.
George was different from most of the other guys at
El Camino. He was an intellectual, a free thinker. George
(11:16):
didn't approve of Candy being in a sorority, too conventional,
too bourgeois, so they started going to anti war protests instead.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
I remember my mother was horrified because she had long hair,
which wasn't long hair at all.
Speaker 7 (11:31):
You know.
Speaker 6 (11:32):
It was just like he could combit and it came
to his bottom of his ear, you know.
Speaker 7 (11:37):
But she never liked anybody that was with.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
George had his whole life planned out, and central to
that plan was not getting sent to Vietnam.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
That was his life, you know. He was a student
and an anthropologist student, so that had a big future.
And he figured that he would go to school and
then go to graduate school, and then go on to
get a doctorate, and then by the time he was
twenty eight, he would have to get married just to
avoid the draft.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Candy and George had only been dating for three months.
They never talked about marriage, or if they had, it
was something in the way distant future. But when Candy
heard lbj's announcement on the radio, she felt her world
turn upside down. If the marriage deferment was gone, what
(12:22):
if the college deferment was next, what would stop George
from being drafted. The second Candy got to work, she
called George's house and left a message with his mom.
She said that she would do whatever he wanted, whatever
was necessary to keep him safe.
Speaker 6 (12:40):
After a couple of hours, I got a phone call
that said there was an emergency that I had to
go home. I remember telling the girl next to me,
I think I'm getting married.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
So as it happens, Candy wasn't the only young woman
in southern California getting an urgent phone call in the
middle of the afternoon. Eighteen year old Claudia was working
as a bookkeeper at the Jolly Roger Inn near Disneyland
when her boyfriend David called out of the blue.
Speaker 8 (13:07):
So Claudia is at work, she gets a phone call
from David saying, Hey, there's this executive order that was issued.
We need to get married.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That's Ashton Avila, a filmmaker. Ashton made a short film
called I Got You Babe. That's a fictionalized account of
Claudia and David's adventures that night in nineteen sixty five.
Ashton says that Claudia was in the same boat as Candy.
She'd only started dating David that summer, and suddenly she
(13:37):
was faced with a huge decision. Sensing Claudia's hesitation, David
pushed harder. So you don't love me, he asked. Claudia,
you just want me to die over in Vietnam. Of
course she loved him, and of course she didn't want
him to die anywhere. She just needed a minute to think.
(13:58):
But David said if they wanted to get married before midnight,
they had to leave right now.
Speaker 8 (14:04):
After the announcement, people realized the old only place in
the US that you could get married without a blood
test or a waiting period was the State of Nevada.
So people all over the country who knew that they
wanted to make it in for this draft deferment fled
to Nevada.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
David's friend had a car and the plan was to
drive to Vegas, which was at least five hours away.
Completely overwhelmed, Claudia tried to explain the situation to her boss,
who was less than sympathetic. He was from the World
War II generation and had strong feelings about so called
draft dodgers.
Speaker 8 (14:44):
She said, I need to go because I need to
go and get married, and he said, well, if you leave,
don't bother coming back, because you don't have a job
here anymore.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
As if Claudia's decision wasn't hard enough now her job
was on the line, but there wasn't time to think.
David needed her help, and that's all she knew.
Speaker 8 (15:01):
She left the job. They went to get married. They
got in their friend's car and they started driving towards
life Las Vegas.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Candy and George also had their sights set on Vegas,
but they bought plane tickets. Actually, George's mom bought the
plane tickets. She was dead set on getting George married
before midnight and keeping him out of harm's way.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
When Candy and.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
George got to the airport, it was full of other
young couples with the same determined and slightly dazed look
in their eye.
Speaker 6 (15:32):
It was Bonanza Airlines and they had to put on
three extra airplanes because there were so many couples going
to Las Vegas right then to get married.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
So that was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
For Amy Ruttenberg, the historian, hearing about these young couples
dropping everything and racing to Vegas drives home just how
anxious this entire generation was about being drafted.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Well, it certainly shows how serious these couples were about
avoiding this. I mean, if the news drops and within
twenty four hours you're on a plane to Las Vegas
in nineteen sixty five, right, that's pretty serious.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
When we asked Candy if she had any second thoughts
as she was boarding a Bonanza Airlines flight to Vegas
to marry a guy she'd only known for three months,
she said no.
Speaker 6 (16:19):
There wasn't any hesitation. It was just like, well, this
is something we have to do. It's different, but let's
do it, you know, So I didn't worry. I called
my mother before I left, and she said, are you pregnant,
because that's my mother.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Claudia, on the other hand, wasn't convinced. The long car
ride to Vegas gave her way too much time to think.
David's friend brought his fiance, and the other couple bickered
and fought in the front seat the entire trip. How
did Claudia know that she and David wouldn't end up
like them? Was she really ready to be somebody's wife?
Speaker 8 (17:01):
I think she was torn between She really, you know,
loved David and she wanted to be with him, and
she didn't want him to go to war. Like obviously
she said yes for a reason, but I think she
also was battling with the idea of what does it
mean to be a woman in nineteen sixty five and
what does it mean to get married and have your
(17:21):
life change it that way? And the expectations of you
as a wife and a mother, And then all of
a sudden it's like, hey, you have, you know, six
hours to decide if you were going to give all
that up.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
As Claudia, David, Candy, and George set off for Vegas,
they had two burning questions racing through their minds. One,
would they actually make it to Vegas on time to
get married by midnight, and two was all of this
completely crazy. On August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five, Larry
(18:03):
Fugate was a twenty year old cub reporter for the
Las Vegas Review Journal, the city paper. It was close
to nine pm on a Thursday and the journal office
was almost empty. Then the phone rang.
Speaker 8 (18:16):
And he gets this phone call that somebody says, Hey,
there's something going on at the courthouse. And Larry says
to like one of the last reporters there, being like, hey,
there's something going on at the courthouse that maybe we
should go and look into. And they were like, I'm
going home. If you want to go do.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That, you can.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
So Larry, being an eager beaver, grabbed his notebook and
high tailed it for the courthouse. He couldn't believe what
he saw. There were people everywhere. Police were on duty
trying to control the increasingly jittery crowd. When Larry realized
that people had flown to Vegas from all over the
country for a last minute draft reprieve, he knew that
(18:57):
he'd stumbled on the best story in Vegas that night.
Speaker 8 (19:01):
I remember him describing he goes there were women with
soda pop cans in their hair, the curling and he goes,
and men who look like they walked off a construction site.
And it was just this kind of chaotic group of people.
And he went and he interviewed a bunch of the
people there.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
There was a tall young man who'd flown all the
way from Pittsburgh with his sweetheart and his parents. He
admitted that he'd only known his future wife for four weeks,
but said they'd discussed marriage before. Once emotions were running high.
Most of the young women were either giddy or in
(19:39):
tears or both. The young men paced around chain smoking cigarettes.
One twenty year old kid told Larry quote, sure, I'm
not ready to be married, but I'm not going to
fight in some dirty jungle. The parents were on edge too.
When Larry tried to interview one father, he was shouted away.
(20:00):
The man didn't want his son's name in the papers
as a quote. Draft Dodger.
Speaker 8 (20:06):
Did have their opinions of what was right and what
was wrong. And also, you know, we were closer to
that World War II victory right where America was the
big hero and you know, or one of the big heroes,
and you know, the pride of being like, you know,
you fought the Nazis, you like, did good for the world,
all of that, and then to go into this war
(20:27):
that was so muddy about the intention of it, and
to have those veterans from World War Two be like,
you fight for your country, We're proud to be American,
all this stuff, and then to have this war that's like, wait,
this isn't the same situation, But how do I explain
that to an older generation.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
One of the Clark County police officers turned to larry
and equipped. It seems romance is now spelled v I
e T NAM. Inside the marriage license bureau, things were
getting chaotic. Lydia Cartwright was on duty that night. She
remembers getting frantic phone calls from all over the country.
(21:07):
Men were calling from New York in Chicago asking Lydia
to marry them right over the phone. She politely declined.
Most of the couples didn't have wedding rings, and none
of the girls wore wedding dresses. Someone showed up with
a veil and several of the brides passed it around,
recycling it for their rushed ceremony with the Justice of
(21:28):
the Peace Meanwhile, more and more couples were arriving in
Vegas by plane and by car, trying to beat the
midnight deadline.
Speaker 8 (21:38):
The feeling of Las Vegas that night was cars were
driving down the boulevard and people were yelling at the
cars and saying, the courthouse is that way, Like people
in the streets were pointing them in the direction because
they knew what everyone was doing.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Candy Riddell and George Warren landed in Las Vegas around
nine thirty. They had no idea if the courthouse was
even open. They jumped in a taxi and the driver
insisted on stopping at every single quickie, wea chapel along
the strip.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
They must have had a deal with them, you know
that he's tried to sell people on the way, and
we had to get out and go into some of them,
and we're just panicky, you know. We got to get
to the We got to get to the courthouse. And
then when you get to the courthouse it was closed.
They had to close for an hour to take lunch.
This was like at ten o'clock at night, though, you know,
so they were preparing for a big influx and then
(22:29):
so there was just jam a hallway jammed of people
waiting for the courthouse.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
To open again.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
I think it's just that we were all nervous that
we were going to get married in time.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Candy and George didn't know it, but they were some
of the lucky ones. All across America, thousands of other
couples like them were frantically trying to get married too,
but with little luck. In Elkton, Maryland, for example, which
at one time was the most popular marriage mill on
the East Coast, police and city officials fielded hundreds of
(23:01):
phone calls. They tried to explain that Maryland outlawed quickie
marriages years ago, but that didn't stop throngs of young
couples for making the late night drive. Elkton police told
newspapers that out of state couples quote ran around like
a bunch of ninnies trying to circumvent the forty eight
hour waiting period. They even tracked down a local judge
(23:25):
who had the authority to waive the waiting period, but
only it turned out if one of the parties was
a Maryland resident. At the night court in New York City,
a rush of young couples begged the judge to marry
them before midnight, but he sent them packing. In Texas,
a reporter caught up to a nineteen year old couple
(23:47):
who were turned away from a county clerk's office because
of the three day waiting period. The dejected young man
accused the reporter of being a spy for the draft board, saying, quote,
if I give you my name, I'd be drafted in
the morning. Nevada was one of the only places left
in the country where a quick wedding was legal, but
(24:08):
the window was closing there too. Back in Vegas, Candy
and George made it to the front of the line
around eleven o'clock. They got their marriage license and then
had to wait in another anxious line for the Justice
of the Peace. Judge Brennan, performed a short ceremony in
his office, but Candy says it was all a blur.
(24:31):
She doesn't remember a word. Before she knew it, she
and George were back out on the streets of Las Vegas,
two newly weds.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
Well, it was just not my intention to have a wedding,
you know, I wasn't I never thought about being a bride.
You know, if it happened one day, it would happen,
so it was all still a kind of a swirling around, and.
Speaker 7 (24:50):
It was just I don't know.
Speaker 6 (24:52):
We were just in a daze.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
I think for a long time.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Claudia and David had an even wilder ride. They drove
all the way from la but it took longer than
they thought. The whole drive, Claudia was going back and
forth in her mind, should she do this? Was she crazy?
She decided to let fate decide. If we don't make
it by twelve, that design that you wasn't supposed to
(25:14):
marry David. They pulled up to the courthouse at exactly
the stroke of midnight.
Speaker 8 (25:20):
They were like, we're not going to make it. We're
not going to make it, and the car pulls up,
they get out of the car, they run, and as
they're going to the entrance to the courthouse, people are
leaving the courthouse in tears and they're crying and they're upset,
and they say, what's going on, and they say, we
didn't make it in time. It's too late. We didn't
make it in time. And Claudia is like, well, that's it,
we didn't make it in time, and David says, no,
(25:42):
if they're going to tell me. No, They're going to
tell me to my face.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Ashton admits that this next part sounds like a scene
from a cheesy movie, but she swears that it's true.
Speaker 8 (25:52):
So they get to the door and the woman is
literally putting like the padlock, like locking the door, and
he tells her, I don't want to go to Vietnam.
I don't want to die like I need to get
married tonight, and she just took pity on him and
let the two of them in, and they were the
last people to be married in Clark County that night.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Judge Brennan didn't leave the Clark County Courthouse until after
two am. Too wired to sleep, he went for a
beer at the back bar of the Horseshoe Casino. George's
mom booked Candy and him a room at the Sands Hotel,
but Claudia and David didn't have anywhere to go after
their midnight wedding. They wandered into an old school casino
(26:36):
called Diamond Jim's Nevada Club, and Claudia dropped a nickel
into one of the slot machines. Ding ding went the
lights and out poured twenty dollars in change enough to
afford a low budget honeymoon at the Hacienda Hotel and Casino.
Speaker 8 (26:53):
They got married and they stayed in a hotel that night,
But it was also kind of a very somber feeling
of what did we just do? I imagine it's like that
moment in the Graduate where they're sitting in the back
of the bus and they have to realize, oh shit,
oh what just happened.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Less than twelve hours ago, Claudia and David were just
two kids living in Anaheim, with no real plans for
the future. Now they were two married people with no
real plans for the future. All they knew was that
David was safe for now, at least. We read a
lot of old newspaper articles while researching the craziness of
(27:31):
August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five. There was Larry Fugate's
story for the Las Vegas Review Journal, of course, but
every major newspaper in the country also ran an article
about the midnight marriage madness. Of all the wedding stories
we read, though one stood out as the most improbable
(27:53):
and perhaps the most magical of them all. The details
were first reported in the Saint Joseph Gazette, in Saint Joseph, Missouri.
But to tell it, we need to take you back
to that fateful night when everything changed for one young couple.
(28:20):
Dan and Nancy Wilson started dating in nineteen sixty two.
Dan was a senior at Benton High School in Saint Joseph, Missouri,
and Nancy was a freshman.
Speaker 7 (28:30):
Well, actually, we've known each other almost all of our life.
We grew up only about a block and a half
away from each other, and so there was a few
years of difference between us in age, so I was
always ahead of her, And it wasn't until the teenage
years that I finally started noticing this pretty little girl
down the street and she caught my eye, and thanks
(28:52):
kind of took off from there.
Speaker 9 (28:54):
Well, we'd kind of been noticing each other in school,
and then during the summer spent a little time over
the swimming pool and happened to notice him there, And
one weekend we went to a county fair and he
asked me if I would like to have a ride
home with him, and been together pretty much ever since then.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
By the time Nancy graduated, Dan already had the rest
of their lives planned out. They'd own a funeral home.
Of course, let me explain. After high school, Dan attended
community college and got a part time job at a
local funeral home, and.
Speaker 7 (29:30):
The gentleman that owned the funeral home came to him
and said, you know, I got this funeral home, but
I have three daughters and none of them have any
interest in the business. So for the right young man,
if you want to get your license, come back and
work here at the funeral home. There could be a
bright future.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Dan was all in, but to take over the business,
he had to attend mortuary school first and get his
mortuary license. Dan and Nancy were deeply committed to each other,
but to realize their bright future as funeral home owners,
they'd have to spend a whole year apart mortuary school
(30:07):
in Dallas, Texas, five hundred and fifty miles from Saint Joseph.
Being a part would be hard for the young lovebirds,
but during Christmas break in nineteen sixty four, Dan made
it official. He asked Nancy to marry him, and she
said yes, of course. They set a date for September fourth,
(30:28):
nineteen sixty five, exactly a week after Dan would graduate.
Everything was falling into place. Dan went back to Dallas.
Nancy stayed in Saint Joseph, and they dreamed of their
September wedding.
Speaker 7 (30:42):
The plan was to get married at our church whenever
got back home. Invitations were out, just immediate family, her
family and mine, just a small we'll get together, and
everything was all set out and we were looking forward
to that.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Dan says he didn't think much about the draft at
the time. He knew kids from high school who were
serving in Vietnam, and he didn't have anything against the war.
In fact, Dan says he would have been proud to
serve his country, but all he was thinking about in
nineteen sixty five was finishing school, getting that mortuary license,
(31:17):
and marrying his sweetheart. Then came August twenty sixth LBJ
signed the executive order saying that after midnight the marriage
to Ferment was going away. Dan heard the news about
the rule change around five PM, but he didn't really
see how it affected him. It wasn't until later that
(31:39):
night that some of Dan's classmates from Missouri gave him
something to worry about. If any of them were drafted
right out of mortuary school, they were up a creek. Apparently,
the licensing process in Missouri followed a strict timeline. After
you got your mortuary degree, there was a one year preceptorship,
(32:01):
and then you took the state boards. If Dan and
his friends were sent to Vietnam, the process could be
delayed for years, or they might even have to repeat
mortuary school when they got back.
Speaker 7 (32:13):
And we thought that was a tremendous waste of time
and money. And I had already borrowed the mighty to
go to school to start with the first time. So
I was on a pretty tight time frame anyway already,
and we were looking to get married, so I didn't
need anything that might potentially interrupt me completing my preceptorship,
passing my state boards, and then getting license. So we're
having this discussion with my classmates, and I decided that
(32:37):
this may be an issue here for us in the
state of Missouri if we don't follow through on a
time frame.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
What's crazy was that Dan and Nancy were all set
to get married in a little over a week. They
even had their marriage license already. The fact that lbj's
announcement came when it did during the extremely narrow window
between the end of school and marriage too perfectly legit
(33:04):
draft deferments was wild. Now Dan and Nancy's entire plan
was in jeopardy. But what could they do about it.
Speaker 7 (33:13):
One of the guys suggested, well, you know, you guys
have already got your license and everything. You could go
ahead and get married over the phone, and then we
could you school from there and have your church wedding later. Well,
we all laughed about that and thought it was funny,
and then we pondered it a little longer.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Wait a second, could that actually work? Can two people
really get married over the phone? He needed to talk
to Nancy. It was now ten thirty pm, ninety minutes
until midnight. Nancy, it turned out, was at a bridal shower,
her bridal shower when Dan called in the middle of
(33:51):
her party, yapping about a telephone wedding. She thought he
was kidding, But after Dan explained everything, Nancy had no choice.
She was on board.
Speaker 7 (34:03):
Well, we had to find out first of all if
it was legal and what could be done about it.
And eventually we got to a magistrate judge in Saint Joe, Missouri,
Margaret Young was her name, and she said, yes, it's.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Legal, but there was a catch.
Speaker 7 (34:18):
You'll have to have the parties together. She said, I'll
have to be with Nancy and You'll need to be
hooked up in Dallas with some officient in Dallas. Well,
I'm thinking, okay, Margaret Young, the judge is on a phone,
Nancy's on a phone, the minister in Dallas is on
a phone, and I'm on a phone. Now we got
a four way conference call. Let's make it happen. And
(34:40):
so we started moving to that direction. And now we're
talking about it's getting ten thirty eleven o'clock at nine,
so sneaking up on that midnight hour. And Margaret Young says, no, no, no, Dan,
you have to be in the presence of the minister.
You can't just be on the phone. And I have
to be in the presence of Nancy.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
So let's get this straight. If Dan and Nancy were
going to pull this off, if they were really going
to get married by telephone from different states, Dan had
to find a minister in Dallas.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Like now.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Dan and his friends grabbed the Yellow Pages, flipped to
the church's section, and started making phone calls. At eleven
fifteen pm, someone finally picked up doctor G. N. Goldstin,
Associate pastor of the East Dallas Christian Church was in
the shower when he fielded Dan's random call.
Speaker 7 (35:37):
I said, here's our situation, here's what we'd like to do,
and I went through the whole background. I said, we
have a judge at the other end who says this
will be legallet but we need an efficient here. I
explained the story, and he was compassionate and understanding. He said, okay,
I help you out.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Dan and his three friends jumped in a car and
raced to doctor Goldstein's house.
Speaker 7 (35:59):
We had to scurry across Dallas to get to the minister,
and by this it's now getting late at night, and
the minister that we were talking to, he was in
his pajamas when he answered the door.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Meanwhile, back in Saint Joseph, Nancy's bridal shower was quickly
being converted into a wedding. The bridesmaids snapped into action.
Speaker 10 (36:21):
One of the girls her parents owned a floor's shop,
so that's how we were able to get a bouquet
at the last minute, and they grabbed my dress and
it's just kind of chaos. They're all changing my clothes
and making the bouquet, and somehow it all worked out.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
At eleven thirty eight pm, Nancy stood in her parents'
kitchen in Saint Joseph, wearing her beautiful white wedding dress,
bouquet in one hand, phone receiver in the other. One
of Nancy's bridesmaids held up a framed photo of Dan
so they'd feel a little closer to each other. Magistrate
Margaret Young was in an upstairs bedroom with Nancy's pa parents,
(37:07):
officiating from a separate line two states away in Dallas.
Dan said, I do witnessed as law required by an
ordained stranger. In pajamas, Dan and Nancy made the midnight
deadline with a few minutes to spare. As a wedding present.
Dan's friend Jerry offered to pay doctor Goldstin for the
(37:30):
long distance charges. It was thirteen dollars. Only when Dan
hung up the phone did it hit him. He was
finally married to his favorite girl, but she was five
hundred and fifty miles away.
Speaker 7 (37:45):
It was not at all what I had anticipated my
wedding night was going to be. I'm going home by myself.
You know, That's not when it's supposed to be. But
the last thing that we said to each other, and
whenever we finished the phone call was I'll see you
in two days, because two days later it was going
to be graduation and she was coming.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
To Dallas later, the long distance newlyweds finally shared a
first kiss and set off on their life together. As
it turned out, the whole mortuary school thing was a bust.
The older couple who owned the funeral home decided not
to retire after all. Dan switched to a marketing career
(38:26):
and never looked back. This August, Dan and Nancy Wilson
will celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary.
Speaker 10 (38:34):
Yeah, it's a long time in it. I've let him
live that long.
Speaker 7 (38:42):
We are both so blessed and that we have each other.
And somehow we knew from the very beginning that we
were met for each other. It's just just so we've
always been together. We don't know any different. We love
each other, we cherish each other time together, So it's
all good. It's all good.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
By one estimate, twenty thousand couples got married on August
twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five. Not all of them ended
as happily as Dan and Nancy's. Candy and George stayed
together for five years. They moved to Eugene Oregon, so
George could attend graduate school within a day's drive of
(39:25):
the Canadian border. He never did get over that draft thing.
In nineteen seventy, George fell in love with a woman
he met in Mexico, and he and Candy divorced, no
hard feelings. Candy says they remained good friends until George
passed away in twenty eighteen. Does she regret marrying George
(39:46):
so suddenly in nineteen sixty five, would she have done
anything differently?
Speaker 7 (39:51):
No?
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I think I did the right thing.
Speaker 6 (39:52):
He had definite desires to avoid being in the service
at that time, you know, and I believed in him,
and you know we were in love. You know, you
do stuff then, right?
Speaker 2 (40:02):
What about Claudia and David, Well, they almost didn't make
it either. Claudia's family was so ashamed that she'd married
a quote draft dodger that they told her not to
tell anyone. Two days later, Claudia had to attend her
cousin's wedding.
Speaker 8 (40:20):
And as she was walking her down the aisle, no
one knew that Claudia was married, and she was crying
and she goes and I'm sure it was interpreted as
tears of joy for this wedding, but I was crying
because I was watching her have the wedding I was
never going to get to have, which was very, very heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Claudia and David tried to make it work though they
had two kids together, but after six years they split up.
That was nineteen seventy one. Fast forward to twenty eleven.
Because they had kids together, Claudia and David never completely
left each other's lives. In twenty eleven, their first great
(41:00):
grandson was born in San Diego. Claudia and David made
the drive down from La together and got to talking.
David told Claudia that even after forty years, he never
stopped loving her. Two months later they were remarried, but
not in Vegas this time. When Ashton Avila was making
(41:22):
her short film based on Claudia and David's story, she
worried that Claudia's character would come across as weak. Clearly
she wasn't ready to marry David that day in nineteen
sixty five, but she did it anyway.
Speaker 8 (41:36):
I think there are different looks of what strength is
for women, and that was a huge discussion we had
when we were working on the film. Was at the end,
would a strong woman walk away and not get married
because she knows that she wants her own life, or
would a strong woman sacrifice what she wants to save
(41:59):
the life of somebody else? And I think that there's
strength in both of those options.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Like thousands of other couples, lives took an unexpected turn
on August twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five, Claudia decided to
stand by David's side sixty years ago, and she's still
there today. Happy sixtieth anniversary to all the gray haired
couples out there who have LBJ to think or to
(42:27):
blame for sending them scrambling to the altar all those
years ago. You've shown us that there's truly no limit
to the things we'll do for love.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
So we often say about these episodes that you know,
this should be a movie, but I really mean it
with this one. I think there's some real juicy roles
for a lot of nice ensemble in this. Saren is
our resident casting director. Did you happen to cast this one?
Speaker 4 (42:55):
I got to completely agree with you that this is
film ready, Like Hollywood, take note. So here's just some
casting suggestions. I started with the twenty something cub reporter
from the Las Vegas Review Journal who was bouncing around
that night covering everybody. I thought, for him, you wanted
somebody fun, but yes, also somebody who feels like a journalist.
So I picked Noah Sentino, that guy from the Netflix
spy show The Recruit.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
He's kind of a floppy haired kid.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
I know him from the Netflix series To all the
boys I loved before.
Speaker 4 (43:21):
Yes, there you go. Of course I should have mentioned
that one. Yes, I thought he'd be good. And then
so for the couples, I went with like, I wanted
people who felt like the time period. I wanted them
to have kind of like, you know, not Internet faces.
So I went for Candy and George, the couple who
flew on Bonanza Airlines. I went with Haley Stanfield for
Candy and Finn Cole for George. Finn Cole, if you
(43:43):
don't know him, he played Michael Gray, Polly's son from
Peaky Blinders.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Yeah, you know who I was kind of picturing as
one of the boys, maybe just because he had like
a minor part in Oppenheimer was Jack Quaid.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Oh, I like that call.
Speaker 4 (43:56):
I also went with some World War Two era actors
or at least their most recent parts have been that
it picked some guys from Masters of Air. So I
had Austin Butler also aka Elvis. I had him playing David,
and then claw Aaudia, the couple who drove to Las Vegas.
I thought, for Claudia, go with Florence Pugh. I thought
that would be a nice couple. Florence Peugh Austin Butler.
I can imagine them in that car ride, stuck with
the other couple, crying and everything.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So I was like, Okay, now the other one I
picked with.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
The Wilsons, Dan Wilson and Nancy Wilson, not from Heart
the Band. Now Dan Wilson, I went with Callum Turner,
who played Bucky Egan from Masters of War. And then
for Nancy, I went with Sydney Sweeney. I thought they
can nail that as a relationship, and I really loved them.
And then all the details like when she's sitting there
holding up the photo of Dan so she can feel
closer to him at the wedding.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Oh Mike, my heart melted at that.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
And then the fact that the end when they get
back together, Oh my god, I lost it.
Speaker 1 (44:45):
I loved this whole series.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
I'm in the fandango app trying to get tickets already.
Speaker 4 (44:51):
Yes, oh my god, Yes, did you guys have any
very special characters you pulled from the step?
Speaker 3 (44:55):
So I didn't want to play favorites with any of
the actual couples, So I'm trying to pick from the
people who helped them along their way. So whether it's
the judge in Missouri and the minister in Texas, maybe
they could share the honor the secretary who covered the
clock with her typewriting cover. That's that's great, But I'm
going to give it to the fast thinking people of
(45:15):
Bonanza Airlines who in real time were able to decide
we need more flights. Can you imagine that today? Like
you're at an airport and someone just decides that, yes,
we got a lot of people going to Vegas for
some reason, get the other planes out of the hangar
a different time.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
I'm telling you, what about you, Dana, did you have one?
Speaker 2 (45:32):
I think it is the secretary for me because I
can imagine that scene in the movie when she goes
midnight not on my time.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
Yeah, I loved that lady from the Clark County Courthouse
who undoes the lock. So they can go in and
get married. I just love the image of her undoing
the lock. I was like, yeah, she's like out there
pad locking in the courthouse and she's like, okay, I'll
let you and last ones to get married in the
night of a thousand weddings.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
A lot of civil disobedience on display here.
Speaker 4 (46:01):
And I love to took place in Vegas. It felt
so right that it was Vegas. I mean, this couldn't
happen in like Cincinnati. I guess you could, but I
mean this is not the same.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
It's the prequel to Anora that we all want.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Totally very special episodes is made by some very special people.
Today's episode was written by Dave Russ. If you like
this one and you're enjoying the NCAA tournament, go check
out an episode Dave wrote for us last May. It's
called The Shot. It's about the only three point shot
in basketball history that saved thousands of lives. Day Scott
(46:37):
Severn more in the pipeline for this stretch special thanks
to filmmaker Ashton Avila, who shared her invaluable research and
contacts from making her short film I Got You Babe.
Go check that out. This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz,
Zaron Burnett, and Jason English. Our super producer is Josh Fisher.
(46:58):
Editing and sound design by Chris Childs, Mixing and mastering
by Chris Childs. Additional editing by Mary Doo, original music
by Elise McCoy, bactchecking by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson.
Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
(47:19):
You'd like to email the show, hit us up at
Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Our plan is
to have new episodes every Wednesday from now into July,
so we will see you back here next week. Very
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Dana Schwartz
Jason English
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