by Ted Sherman

Created on: March 09, 2009

To my wife's chagrin, and after nearly 44 years of marriage, I still tell the same joke. I say it was a military wedding, because the ceremony was conducted with her Army sergeant dad's M16 rifle poking my back. However, for the sake of my wife and kids, I hasten to say it is just a joke.

I also still kid about my early contact with my wife's dad. He was an Army "lifer", a career soldier. I believed he hated me because I was a Navy reservist at the time and outranked him. Whenever he referred to me as a swabbie, I responded by calling him a dogface.

Even if my future father-in-law didn't hate me, he had many reasons to be concerned about his daughter marrying a 35-year-old journalism grad student who had no prospects of ever earning enough money to support her. My future wife's mother had died several years before, and I'm sure she would have been at least as worried about the marriage as the dad was.

So, after we became officially engaged, I changed my class schedule to night courses, and went looking for a job. I worked up a classy resume, some of it actually true, and managed to land an ad copywriter position with a large company that made components for space vehicles.

We set the date for the wedding, and my future wife made all the usual plans and sent out invitations to 100 or so people. Of course, her dad wasn't too thrilled that the only contribution I could make to the wedding was to promise to show up at the right time.

Then, three weeks before the wedding ceremony was scheduled to take place, I managed to convince my future wife that we should elope. I reasoned that her dad could save all the money, while we'd combine an inexpensive ceremony with a honeymoon at one time. All we had to do was fly to Las Vegas. We left a note for her dad and boarded a red eye at the airport, which in 1966 cost us a total of $150 for two round-trip flights.

As soon as we arrived at the Vegas airport, we asked a cabbie to recommend one of the city's famed wedding chapels. It was 3 am when we arrived at the cheesy little chapel on the Strip, so the justice-of-the-peace performed the ceremony in his pajamas, while his nightgown-clad wife stood by as witness. We celebrated our three weekend honeymoon nights in a nearby hotel, after begging the clerk to give us the wedding suite for $25 a night.

When we got back home and moved into my little apartment near the university, I was surprised that my wife's dad was very pleasant to me. Of course, the fact that he saved a thousand bucks because the big formal ceremony had been cancelled was a good reason for him to be happy.

We struggled financially for awhile, but within a year after I completed my grad studies at the university, I got a good ad department management job that lasted 30 years. We welcomed our baby son two years after the marriage, and in another two years, our daughter entered the world.

We return to Vegas almost every year with our family to celebrate our anniversary, and sometimes stop in to visit the little old wedding chapel on the Strip where it all started.

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