Weddings
A Special Wedding
We started researching our new book GAME TOWN, in
Hollywood, 1957. Reading newspapers and magazines of the year we came across some
amazing stories of people's lives after WWII. Here is one of those amazing
stories.
World War II,
Maj. Claud Hensinger and his crew made a successful bombing run over Yowata,
Japan. However, on the way back to base,
one of their engines caught fire and they were forced to bail out over China. In
1944, much of China was still occupied by the Japanese who were always on the
lookout for down Allied aviators.
Hensinger
was also injured from landing on a pile of sharp rocks and was bleeding. He
kept his parachute after landing. The chute kept him warm and kept his bleeding
to a minimum.
When the
war ended, he returned to Pennsylvania, where he reconnected with Ruth. When he
got down on one knee, he proposed to her without a ring. Instead, he gave her
the parachute and told Ruth how it saved
his life and that he wanted her to make a wedding dress from the dirty,
blood-stained nylon.
She said
yes to both questions. One day, while she was walking by a store, the
inspiration came to her. In the store window there was a dress inspired by the one worn by
Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 film Gone
With the Wind. She patterned the dress to match that while
designing a veil and bodice.
A local
seamstress sewed the veil and bodice, Ruth sewed the skirt, using the parachute
strings to lace the skirt. Keeping with tradition, Hensinger didn't get to see
his wife's parachute dress until she walked down the aisle. He was a happy man,
according to Ruth.
The couple
was married for 49 years before Hensinger died in 1996. In the years between,
two other generations of women were married in Ruth Hensinger's parachute dress. The dress is now on display
at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History.
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