When Donna Houser came across a 100-year-old wedding dress in the collection at Allen County Historical Museum, she instantly wanted to put together a display of other such dresses. Unsure if she could find many of that age, she asked fellow docents Naida House and Amy Specht if they still had their bridal gowns. They did.
The result is a four-dress display of gowns dating from 1959 and back.
Each dress has a story.
Donna Houser’s dress is now a tawny gold. Pearls across the bodice are brown. When she first saw the wedding dress in a window of Lewin’s Department Store in Wichita in 1959, the dress was pure white.
Seven layers of lace beneath the overskirt poofed the dress out. A bone and five-tiered hoop under the skirt helped also. Houser, then Donna Snyder, was smitten.
The price tag was $250, Houser said. “That was too expensive.”
Undeterred, she found a way to pay for gown and garter and veil, then, after her picture-perfect affair, “lent out the whole shebang, including the garter, to about 20 friends. So I feel I got my money’s worth,” Houser said.
She ponders why the dress has gone so dark over the years.
“I had it dry cleaned and they were supposed to preserve it,” she noted.
A secret only those at Houser’s wedding had known was that she wore no shoes in her ceremony.
“I hate heels,” the 5’ 7” Houser said. “The train was so full no one knew.” In addition, she said, nylons bother her skin, so she was bare-legged as well as barefooted.
“When I went to show off my garter at the reception, everyone found out,” she laughed. What could have been seen as scandalous was instead taken in good fun. “They all laughed,” Houser recalled.
IT’S NOT likely the same would have happened for Naida House.
“I went to a store called Wurzburg’s,” House said, beginning the tale of her dress. “It had a lace bodice that needed alteration.”
Her mother hadn’t been along for the purchase, but accompanied her to the fitting.
“She vetoed the lace. She said emphatically ‘no,’” House said.
House’s mother was “raised in a church just a little less conservative than the Amish,” she noted. “Everything had to be simple.”
Even though wedding dresses of that era — House was married in 1948 — were typically bedecked in lace and pearls, House’s mother, Ella Bradley, wouldn’t allow it.
Bradley found a dress of simple satin, cut straight with long concealing sleeves. The only concession to fashion was princess seaming and a jewel neckline tiered with transparent and satin ribbon: the look recalls the ornate collars of ancient Egypt.
Keeping with her mother’s preference, “I wore no jewelry,” House recalled.
There was still a problem, House explained.
“My train had these puckers in it.” The puckers were also too flashy for the Church of the Brethren, so “in the dressing room, they kept ironing it until it was smooth,” House said.
The puckering in the train, Houser explained, was another classic wedding gown feature. It was created by loops sewn into the train so it could be lifted when a bride was dancing. Typically, she said, such puckering would be integrated into the design on satin trains, or lost in the ruffles if lace.
No matter. There was no dancing at House’s wedding, she said.
Despite it not being her original choice, House saved the dress and all its accoutrement so it could be worn by her daughter some day. When Kim Kristalyn was married, however, it was at a Sunday service — and in her church, trains — even simple ones — weren’t allowed.
When House remarried in 1971, she wore a different dress — but church rules again dictated some part of her wedding.
“We were married in the Lutheran Church and Lutherans are not allowed to marry during Lent, so we waited until after Easter,” she said.
One notable difference to this wedding was that, this time, House herself wanted to keep it simple.
“I said we were just going to have family and friends there.” To her amusement, “we had over 100 people come.”
The couple were happily married for 14 years, until husband Leon’s death in 1985.
AMARYLLIS Specht had church constraints on her wedding, as well, but if she lays any blame, it’s on the U.S. Army.
Her fiance Arch was not allowed leave for their planned November 1951 wedding, so the couple postponed the date until he was allowed time off — for Christmas.
“I had all my invitations sent out, so I had to notify everyone” of the new date, she said. “A lot of the out-of-town people couldn’t come” for the rescheduled date, she said.
The couple married just three days before Christmas, and could secure neither band nor dancing at that popular time.
Specht met the Piqua farm boy when he came to Iola for high school. It was her good fortune that she found herself sitting before him in English class, she said. The two became friends, then sweethearts.
“After high school, he and his older brother went to Parsons and worked for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad,” Specht said. Then he was drafted into the Army.
She and Arch became engaged, and she went to Kansas City in search of a wedding dress.
“I figured I was working, it was my duty” to purchase her own gown, she said. Her dress cost $125.
“I had a blue garter that one of my friends made. I borrowed my sister’s veil.”
Specht saw her husband only on weekends their first few months of marriage. Then the Army sent him to Washington state for 18 months.
The distance didn’t damage their ability to bond.
“We still put up with each other,” she laughed. “I guess he likes me, still, because he hasn’t gotten rid of me,” even after almost 59 years, she said. “He’s a jewel.”
Specht saved her gown and two of her four daughters, Lisa in 1981 and Nancy in 1985, wore it for their weddings.
