Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 14, 1991 TAG: 9102140161
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Lawyers come and go. Security guards greet you at the door.
People in trouble pay their fines, and couples in trouble are here, too - filing for divorce.
And yet room 357 of Roanoke's Church Avenue courthouse is where men and women must go to plunk down their cash and pledge their eternal love.
Twenty bucks and 15 minutes is all it takes to get a marriage license these days - a lot less than it takes to get divorce papers. But on Valentine's Day, who's counting?
So for the sake of romance, we spent a few days at the courthouse.
We looked for tender stories of courtships-turned-commitments, for wacky anecdotes of first dates and blind dates and dates that didn't necessarily add up to love-at-first-sight. We wanted mush.
We found it . . . and more.
As deputy clerk Lena Testerman said with a knowing smile, "Everything. You see everything here."
A 45-year veteran of the office, Testerman can spot a couple in love when she sees one. She has, after all, seen thousands. Old couples and young couples. Old folks marrying young folks.
First cousins marrying first cousins (it's legal). Men trying to marry men (it's not). People trying to return their licenses after they've already married and then changed their minds (too late). Minors trying to get married without a parent's consent (too soon).
"It's strange about marriages this year," Testerman says. "We had 60 marriages in January and 55 divorces - that's neck and neck."
But on Valentine's Day, who's counting?
> Michael McCollum and Elizabeth Smith used to date when they were teen-agers. Then she married somebody else, and he . . . waited. "I'm the kind of guy who doesn't mind waiting," said McCollum, who, at 38, spent more than half of his life doing it. Last Friday, McCollum and Smith got their marriage license, and the wait was over. "See, all those years they talked about each other like they still liked each other, so we finally got them back together," said Alvin Brown, who along with his wife, Dale, accompanied the couple to the courthouse and then to their justice-of-the-peace wedding.
When Steve Smith and Melanie Buchanan came in to get their marriage license a few weeks ago, they got a taste of what wedded bliss will bring in the years to come. There they were, filling out the forms and taking the oath of honesty, when Smith's beeper started going off. So he grabbed the phone and called Roanoke Memorial Hospital, where he's a resident and where Buchanan works as a nurse. The emergency? A pharmacist had called to get Smith's approval for refills on a patient's prescription - for birth-control pills. "Everybody says that's why nurses want to be nurses - so they can marry a doctor - but that's not true," Buchanan, 26, said. "Most nurses don't want anything to do with doctors because they see what their hours are like, and that they're always on call. And they don't want to put up with it." Buchanan, however, seems perfectly content to put up with Smith's beeper attacks. They're planning a Feb. 23 wedding.
When Joseph Russell wants to do something special for his fiancee, Deborah Hawley, he takes her out to his favorite restaurant: Macado's. That's where he took her last Valentine's Day on their first date, and that's where he plans to take her today - after their Valentine nuptials at the Wedding Chapel in Salem. The couple met a few years ago at Old Southwest's Community Grocery, where Russell worked and where Hawley came in to buy food. "I liked him right away," Hawley, 39, said. "But I thought he was married because he didn't flirt. Plus, he was so easy to talk to." Now they both work together at the Brandon Road Arby's, and they're raising Hawley's 13-year-old son together, too.
The bowling alley was the last place Pam Waldron expected to meet her future husband, but it was there where she met Wayne Foley - they were bowling against each other in a league. For their first date, he took her to Fiesta Cantina and then for a drive up Mill Mountain (the old let's-go-look-at-the-Star trick). The couple planned to go to the justice of the peace for their wedding right after they left the clerk's office. "He's a truck driver, and my brother and father are truck drivers, so we're keeping it in the family," Waldron, 31, said.
Dianna Roop wasn't exactly the happy mother of the bride when she escorted her 17-year-old daughter, Stephanie, to the courthouse with 24-year-old Brook McKnight. "I dropped out of school to get married at 16 and started having kids at 17," the mother said wistfully. "None of my other kids finished school, either. I had big hopes for her." Of the five couples interviewed at the courthouse, Stephanie and Brook had perhaps the most poignant love story of all. They've been going steady since Stephanie was 13. Recently she dropped out of school to get married and work at Krispy Kreme. Because Brook is disabled, Stephanie said, he collects Social Security and Supplemental Security Income. "They both have learning disabilities," Dianna said, adding that Stephanie is the more stable of the two and, as such, she tends to mother Brook. "They're not ready to get married, but she couldn't be swayed, just like I couldn't be swayed," she said. "Now that all my children are gone, maybe I'll just go back and get my degree."
by CNB