“Did your mother use these much?” I asked my wife.

I was washing dishes after a meal served on her mother’s wedding china.

“Hardly ever,” Beth replied.

“They didn’t have much to choose from back then,” she said, by way of explaining the pattern.

And then, to make her point: “She got married in a dress made from a parachute.”

“Say again?” I said pausing, soapy dish in hand. “I’ve not heard that story.”

“Aunt Mary had the same pattern; we have hers, too. Twenty-four settings.”

I was thinking about the parachute dress. Wanting to know more.

When I asked about it again the next day, Beth told me that was all she knew about it, that I should call Ida. She would know.

Ida Hammond was a dear friend of my late mother-in-law. They met in Memphis where they both worked in an Army depot during World War II.

Ida, now 91, lives in Tabernash, Colorado, an unincorporated village near Winter Park.

I didn’t want to open with the question about the parachute wedding dress, so we chatted a while. Ida and my mother-in-law, Marguerite “Rety” Hickel, were newlyweds and young mothers together. Their friendship forged during those heady, yet difficult years, lasted a lifetime. They were like sisters.

“We met in the hall and she said, ‘I love your green eyes,’ but I didn’t have green eyes; it was something I had on,” Ida said laughing.

She told me about picnic lunches at a park while the children played; shopping together for groceries on Fridays (“I got to keep the car on Fridays”); and sharing a German Chocolate Cake, the first for both (“It was the best thing I’d ever tasted”).

I asked about the parachute wedding dress.

There was a pause.

“Eddie had me a negligee made from a parachute when he was stationed in Hawaii. I think he didn’t have anything to do and thought it was cute. … It wasn’t.

“Knowing Rety, there was no way she got married in parachute,” Ida said.

We talked on and when I brought up the wedding dress again, Ida was unwavering.

I called Rety’s son, my brother-in-law Ryan, who, while we were on the phone, was able to retrieve his mother’s wedding picture taken in 1946, the year after World War II ended.

“It doesn’t look like it came from a parachute,” he said. “Of course that was before they had nylon.”

“She mentioned it more than once,” Beth said when confronted with Ida and Ryan’s testimony.

Then I did what I should have to begin with. I Googled “wedding dresses from parachutes.”

There I found many stories about wedding dresses made from WWII vintage parachute silk. Among them is that of Maj. Claude Hensinger, an American B-29 pilot, who was shot down in the Pacific after a 1944 bombing raid over Japan.

His parachute not only delivered him safely back to earth, it provided shelter until he was rescued.

Three years later his fiance Ruth used the lifesaving parachute as material for her wedding dress. Ruth modeled her dress on one that appeared in “Gone with the Wind” using the parachute strings to create a gathered look.

The dress is in the Smithsonian.

Google “World War II parachutes for sale” and up comes the Website of a gun shop in Delaware where you will find the following listing:

Excellent Condition AN6510 USGI WW II seat pack Parachute. Used from trainers to P51 Mustangs, this was a mainstay Parachute of WW II. Limited supply of these parachutes exist today and most are degraded badly. This is mint with fine silk 24-foot canopy. $1,295.

Twenty-four feet of silk. Frankly, my dear, that’s a lot of wedding dresses.

You know, there must be someone in this community who got married in a dress made from a WWII parachute. If you are that person or know of someone who did, I’d love to know about it.

Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. He can be reached by phone, 241-6999 or email, [email protected].

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.

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