Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 3, 1995 TAG: 9502030087
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Tim Wilbourne was afraid he was going to miss his own wedding.
He had only a 15-minute window of opportunity in which to get hitched, and that was if everything went according to plan. But now his military troop train was falling further and further behind schedule; sometimes it seemed to barely be creeping through the Virginia night.
A night that was slipping past midnight, with Roanoke still hours away.
"I thought it was so late at night, the pastor would go home," he says. Maybe not just the pastor, either. "I figured the wedding party would have given up the ghost."
But Tim Wilbourne hadn't counted on the determination of his bride-to-be, and the commotion that her wedding plans had stirred up.
The longer the wait turned out to be, the more the crowd waiting for Wilbourne's train at the Roanoke train station seemed to grow. Not just the official wedding party, mind you, but complete strangers who heard the rumor of a wartime wedding as it swept through the lobby of the Hotel Roanoke and got caught up in the excitement.
Fifty years later, Eleanor Wilbourne still marvels at how her wedding drew such a crowd. "We had everybody!"
The romance of Tim Wilbourne and Eleanor Coffman started simply enough. They both worked at the Morris Plan Bank on Campbell Avenue before he went off to join the U.S. Navy. It was 1945. He was 23, she was 22.
Tim was stationed in North Carolina, but not for long. He was expecting to be shipped out in mid-February to duty in the Pacific. In early January, Eleanor visited Tim at his stateside base and they'd decided to get married. He knew he had a leave coming, during which he figured he could return to Roanoke for a proper church wedding.
Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 31, the Navy changed its mind; Tim and his unit would ship out sooner than expected, a lot sooner - that Friday, Feb. 2. What about the leave he had coming? You'll get that when you get to California, son, now get moving.
Tim's first reaction was pragmatic enough. He called Eleanor and asked if she could come down to Ocracoke right away and get married there. Trouble was, the couple needed a Virginia marriage license, and the clerk of court back in Roanoke said he couldn't issue one unless the groom signed some papers.
How could Tim get back to Roanoke to sign the papers between then and Friday? He couldn't.
On Thursday, the long-distance lines were humming, as Tim and Eleanor checked and rechecked the possibilities. There were some.
As luck would have it, Tim's troop train was scheduled to roll through Roanoke sometime Friday night. Even better, it was scheduled to stop in Roanoke, but only for 15 minutes to take on more fuel. Troop trains were little better than prison trains; MPs manned the doors to make sure no one got off. You never knew when some frightened, homesick kid would make a break for it.
Tim figured he could get around that obstacle, somehow.
"What do you think?" he asked Eleanor.
"OK, if I can get it together," she replied.
So the plan was set - mostly her plan, he now says. She'd go to the clerk's office, fill out as much of the paperwork as she could, then sweet-talk the clerk into coming down to the train station Friday night and waiting with the unsigned forms for Tim's train to arrive.
A hasty wedding while the train refueled, they decided, was better than no wedding at all.
"It was between us," she says. "We really planned it."
Did they ever.
Tim dressed in his best uniform to board the train in Norfolk. The sailors sacked out easily in their seats, but Tim slept fitfully as his train lurched across Southside Virginia. "You might call it sleeping," he says. He sure didn't want to miss his stop; on the other hand, there wasn't anything he could do now. All the excitement was on the other end of the line.
There, a reporter from The Roanoke Times recorded the scene:
"The wedding party - minus the groom, of course - stood on the station platform waiting. A kind stationmaster, finding out the group's purpose, advanced the information that the train would be very late; in fact, several hours. So the group conferred, then decided to retire to the Hotel Roanoke to await traintime.
"There, another surprise awaited, for the night staff of the hotel chipped in, moved a table here, changed some flowers there, pushed a few palms into a corner, manuevered several light switches, and in no time an improvised but pretty chapel had been created."
Then everyone waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Eleanor remembers being nervous, although she didn't show it. In fact, The Roanoke Times reported that the bride-to-be "remained quite unruffled." It was everyone else who had the jitters. Friends fretted over Eleanor's corsage, pinning and re-pinning until they had it just right.
Sometime after midnight, the wedding party headed back down to the train station.
"There," The Roanoke Times said, "travelers waiting for trains knew something unusual was up - whispers climbed on whispers; low tones gradually became audible syllables and in no time, everyone knew 'it's a wedding!'"
The stationmaster passed on every scrap of information he could about the troop train's slow progress.
Finally, about 2:30 on the morning of Feb. 3, the train chugged into sight.
The groom's father, Martin Wilbourne, and some friends scampered down to the tracks even before the train's wheels ground to a halt.
On board, friends had rousted Tim from his seat. Some of his fellow officers had agreed to take part in the ceremony, but it was so late, he decided not to wake them. He bounded off the train, "arm cocked so he could read his wristwatch dial."
"I don't have enough time," he shouted.
His protests were drowned out by the cheers of the stationmaster and the crowd of strangers who had gathered. "Get a move on!," they shouted. "Hurry up, boy!" they yelled, "you only get married once! They'll hold the train!"
Indeed, the stationmaster promised to do just that.
Tim hustled up the steps, the crowd parted before him, and he rushed "into the waiting arms of his one and only."
No time for that, though.
The crowd was "in a dither." A secretary from the clerk's office, who had volunteered to handle the paperwork, thrust a form in front of Tim. "Sign your name there," Lena Mills commanded.
With what?
The crowd flapped into "a flurry of motion as 15 men tried to find fountain pens which had suddenly seemed to have disappeared. At last the name was scrawled on the form, and the little group noisily moved out into the street."
With Tim and Eleanor in the lead, the crowd dashed up the hill to the hotel, and quickly assembled themselves into a semblance of a wedding ceremony.
The Rev. John Brokhoff of the Virginia Heights Lutheran Church calmly took charge. "Do you have the rings?" he asked.
The rings!
"Where's Jo?" someone shouted, referring to the ring-bearer. "She's got the rings."
But Josephine was missing. "She was just kind of at the end of the line," Eleanor remembers - the wedding party had bounded up the hill that quickly. A search party found the missing ring-bearer "literally tripping up the front steps."
"Run!" someone shouted.
She did.
The minister began the ritual, and the crowd hushed for the first time all evening.
"I now pronounce you man and wife," he announced, and the groom "unobtrusively" kissed his bride. Well-wishers swarmed around them, then decided it was best to leave them alone for a few moments.
But only a few.
A shout went up. "The train! It might leave!" The crowd hustled away the newlyweds, "and off again on the wild chase through the darkness everyone flew." As the wedding party stampeded through the hotel lobby, two strangers, "attracted by the ceremony," raised a toast.
At the train station, the engine was building up its steam. Despite the hour, the travelers in the lobby seemed even more numerous than before, and even more frantic.
The Roanoke Times remarked on the way everyone chipped in: "The station force was really on the job. Doors were held open; the cop on his beat held back well-wishers and spectators as the little band raced for the stairway."
Tim kissed his bride goodbye, then hopped on the train.
"It was almost moving before he got his foot off," Eleanor recalls.
Inside, Tim jubiliantly made his way down the aisle, waking up his slumbering buddies to tell them the good news. Some razzed him all the way to California for not getting them up earlier.
Eleanor and her family went home, for a party that lasted until dawn.
The Wilbournes' hurry-up-and-wait-wedding in the middle of the night became national news that made a war-weary nation smile. Time magazine wrote a story; so did Stars & Stripes. "Tim's brother was in England with the Air Force, that's where he read about it," Eleanor says. "He picked up 'Stars & Striples' and said, 'My gosh, they got married.' Everybody wanted to hear about it."
Not long afterward, Eleanor set off on her own train ride to California. Tim got his leave, all right - 35 days' worth in San Francisco. That was their honeymoon. "If we'd planned it, we couldn't do it any better," he says. "Man, that's a great honeymoon."
After the war was over, the couple settled in Roanoke, briefly, then moved on to Norfolk as Tim pursued a career as an industrial sales representative for Texaco. Retired today in Alexandria, the couple has two children - son Jim recently moved to Roanoke himself - and two grandchildren.
The family grew up reading the yellowed clippings and listening to their parents' accounts of that frenzied night, now a half-century ago.
Eleanor's been asked to tell the story so many times, she's not sure what embellishments are left to add: "It's a legend now."
by CNB