Courthouse cupid
On this day in 1991, I had a unique romantic holiday newspaper assignment: report on the two dozen couples who tied the knot at the local courthouse.
On this day 35 years ago, I found myself in the Kane County Courthouse in Geneva, Illinois.
It was Valentine’s Day and, in my second week as a newspaper reporter with The Courier News of Elgin, my assignment was a feature story on folks who opted to tie the knot on this romantic holiday. In all, there were 25 couples.1
At 22 years old, I had only been to a few weddings before—and was still over three years away from my own wedding day. For roughly the past 25 years, I’ve had notions of doing a follow-up on some of the people who agreed to allow me to include brief thumbnails of their journey.
Among them:
The young couple—younger than me, even!—who opened and closed the feature. Their photos also graced our front page.
The “to be, not to be and to be again” couple, as I dubbed them. Their previous marriage had lasted a mere seven months before they launched their second try on this day.
The romantic-by-accident couple who had intended to get hitched the day before, only to realize there was no justice of the peace available.
Over the years, questions have been percolating in my mind:
What do they recall from that day? Are they still married? How many are no longer together, whether it was death or something else that did them part?
For a long time, I posted a photocopy of the story on my office wall, a persistent reminder that it would be intriguing to catch up with some of them.
[Click on the image below to read the article.]
In 2011, as the 20th anniversary approached, I suggested to my former newsroom cohorts that they might want to do such a follow-up.
It was a longshot suggestion, amid steadily declining resources in the local media realm. As I expected, nobody pursued it. Over the past 15 years, I’ve only gotten as far as looking up online—but never reaching out to—a few of the couples that I featured way back when.
Maybe that “Where Are They Now?”2 feature will take shape down the road. Somehow, I doubt it, though. A generation ago, there was more of a place for this kind of follow-up journalism. These days, with the Internet and social media and unrelenting 24/7 news cycle, we all have exponentially more access to news, near and far, than we used to.
And, I’d argue, we have way, way more access than is healthy. We can't come close to keeping up, let alone take a moment to look back.
Anyway, on this day, here’s hoping that what began on Valentine’s Day 1991 for these couples has endured and, I daresay, thrived.
And to all of you, my dear readers, whatever your circumstances may be: Happy Valentine’s Day to you!
Anything of Value…
No pain, no gain.
This mantra, a principle tied to physical conditioning, is never explicitly stated during The Boys of ’80, the Netflix documentary on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. But its spirit lingers just beneath the service of this fantastic film.
On a physical level, Coach Herb Brooks pushed those 20 college players to a place they’d never been before. In the process, their mindset was likewise transformed—they began to believe they could win.
As an 11-year-old, I could barely believe my eyes as USA knocked off Russia in the semifinal, 4-3, then overcame a 2-1 deficit to beat Finland, 4-2, and secure the Gold medal.
What made the triumph so special was the enormous difficulty of achieving it—an essential element of so many other things of value, like raising children or having a marriage that stands the test of time3.
Freeze-in-Place Follow-Up
OK, so the follow-up isn’t entirely extinct. To wit: the documentary on Team USA.
Let's wrap up with another rearview mirror moment as we size up the results of last week’s poll:
That’s pretty encouraging to me. To those who took the time to take the poll, may our paths cross soon—and we can freeze together, at least for a few moments. If you’re perplexed by these musings, then that means you didn’t read last week’s column, “Freeze in Place.”
You can check it out here.
If you read the courthouse story closely, you can’t be faulted for being uncertain if there were 24 or 25 couples. The second graf says, “Along with 24 other couples…”
But at the story’s end, I mention a couple was the 24th of the day and it was one minute past 4 o’clock when they wrapped up, just beyond the justice-of-peace hours. My guess is another couple came after them but simply didn’t get (or want) mention.
For over a year, “Where Are They Now?” was the name of my weekly column in the early 1990s for The Courier News. I had a blast with it, and it enabled me to learn so much about local history and to connect with a wide range of newsmakers. The follow-up story is a staple of solid journalism, and I’ve got more than the usual zeal for it, as regular readers of The Inside Edge can attest.
Speaking of “test of time,” Happy 37th Valentine’s Day, Bridgett—yes, I’m counting the five February 14ths that preceded our own wedding.
I bet you could find the men fairly easily in this day and age. It's more of a mixed bag with women and their last names. After, of course, you FOIA the Circuit Clerk for all the marriage licenses issued on that fateful date. Old school and new school journalism.
I was married at the new Kane courthouse. It lasted a little more than a year, although we have a . My cynical side says that very few of these marriages lasted very long.
The 3:56, 3:59 detail in the last paragraph is great.