Sunday, January 18, 2009

Kitchen Table Tales - Wedding tale

Mary and Katherine gave me a list of stories they wanted me to write down, and I'm about at the end of the list. If you have a story you want me to include, let me know.

The story of our wedding is on a past blog - June 2008. However, there was the Bill Teague saga.

Bill Teague is a friend of Byron's (then called Biff), from his Sigma Nu days at UT Austin (then known as The University). Bill is from Odessa and is a couple of years older than Byron. He was an usher at our wedding in 1966.

We had several pre-wedding parties and Bill would drive over from Odessa - once managing to overimbibe and run into the only tree between Pecos and Odessa, and another time stopping at the stop sign on Hackberry and falling out of his car.

During the festivities leading up to the wedding, he developed a crush on Cheryl Garrett, one of the bridesmaids - as did another of the guys. Bill must have made an oblique pass at her at the rehearsal dinner, and she said something like "If you'd try harder, you might get somewhere."

At the wedding, Bill was so drunk he could barely stand up and showed up with his tux shirt studs fastened on the inside of his shirt, wearing a long-billed baseball cap. One of the other ushers leaned him against the wall of the foyer of the church and kept him from falling down.

At the reception at my parents' house, Bill decided to act on Cheryl's suggestion and sort of tackled her (probably meaning to hug her) and they both fell down on the living room floor - in front of God and everybody. Actually, we had already left, so missed the show.

Mary Bird and others had painted my car up (a Nash Rambler with front seats that reclined all the way), and Kenny Hughes drove us in my car to where Byron's car was nice and clean at Jack & Bill's Texaco station, and we were off to Odessa's Sands Motel, then to NYC to stay at the Plaza.

Later, Bill got his PhD in English and taught at the junior college level. He's lately had some health issues (probably related to too much alcohol) but is doing better.

We fixed him up with Byrd, a Theta sister of mine, and they dated for nine years before marrying. We had dinner with them at the Woman's Club just the other night.

2 comments:

KB said...

I want to hear the story about going to the ranch and having people shoot at the stuffed deer. And about the guy in Dad's fraternity on dynamite probation.

You could also tell cool stories about us growing up. We are old enough to defend ourselves.

Kathy said...

I want to know more about Bill Teague, Lolah Mary's crush on Clint Eastwood and the ring