Flick Once upon a time — say, the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s — tradition was to have an ornate, adjective-happy account of your wedding written up in the local paper, with a picture of the bride-in-gown, including all the names of the bridal party, and who cut the cake, and the color of the bridesmaids' dresses, and the kind of flowers, and where the happy nuptials went on their romantic, sea-washed honeymoon. Then tradition went away. Until last Sunday.
Did you get this newspaper? There, on page B7 , was the account of the Del Mar, Calif., wedding of Dennis Graff and Shari Seward, two Central Illinois natives, now respectively 70 and 55, that included the story of how Graff, a Gibson City High basketball all-stater and headline-maker then, too, won in 1974 a large stuffed dog by shooting baskets at the county fair for a friend's then 5-year-old daughter in nearby Tolono. On Aug.
4, 2024 — exactly 50 years later — she also became Graff’s bride. Shari Seward and Dennis Graff For both, it was a soft-boiled romance-novel-come-true, she an educator, a single mom of two grown children and he a business-litigation lawyer for 40 years, the last 25-plus as a bachelor ..
. until they met again a near half-century later. And boy did they know how to marry.
Like a newspaper account out of yesterday, their wedding announcement took an entire page, a color photo of the happy couple, a huge headline ("A Spectacular Wedding") and a write-up of (not a typo) nearly 2,000 words. Song se.