ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 26, 1996 TAG: 9608260076
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
A WHITE FORMAL DRESS that may - or may not - have been someone's wedding gown was found floating like a balloon along a North Carolina highway in June. Now some folks from Charlotte are searching for its owner, a person who may - or may not - have come from Roanoke. Maybe you can help solve the mystery.
She must have been a lovely June bride, the way Dwight Crump pictures it.
After all, how could she have gone wrong wearing a fancy white satin designer dress like that, with seven layers of billowy white crinoline beneath?
What Crump really wants to know, however, is how the dress ended up beside a highway in Charlotte, N.C.
Crump, a 59-year-old retired postal carrier from Charlotte, was driving home from a vacation Bible school the weekend of June 23-25 when he saw something white drifting along the shoulder of Interstate 85.
"It was floating down the highway like a hot-air balloon. I figure air got under it some way," recalled Crump, who pulled over and chased down the wayward dress.
"It's a beautiful dress," Crump said. "I can't imagine somebody not putting an ad in the paper." After a few weeks, when Crump didn't see any mention of the dress in the lost and found notices, he contacted The Charlotte Observer, which ran a small mention about it in a local column.
In the meantime, Crump kept wondering when - if ever - he would find the dress's owner. "If it was a 30-day honeymoon, they probably won't miss it until they fall out of love," he joked.
Crump's only clues about the size 10 dress came from a "Mike Benet Formals" label on the inside with pencilled numbers - ``9028'' on one side and ``333'' on the other. He thought the 9028 might refer to the wedding date, maybe Sept. 28, except he was also pretty sure the dress had already been worn - "The armpits are soiled a little bit," he explained.
A dress-shop owner in Charlotte told Crump she remembered that type dress was usually ordered from Roanoke, and suggested he look to the Star City for the owner.
Enter Margaret Bigger. She's the author of "There's No Such Thing as a Perfect Wedding," a collection of funny true-life wedding tales. Bigger read about Crumb finding the dress and called him, sensing a good story for her next book, "You've Got To Have a Sense of Humor To Have a Wedding."
After talking to Crumb, she called a talk radio show in Roanoke last week and asked listeners to call her if they had any information about the dress.
An alumna of Hollins College, Bigger thought the idea of a Roanoke bride losing the dress sounded about right to her. "It does figure that three hours down the road, a bride and groom might stop. It's a logical place they might stop for the night en route to Charleston or Myrtle Beach," she said.
"It could've flown out the back of their car. Or somebody stupid like me would have put it on top of their car while they were packing, and maybe it blew off that way. It'd be the last thing I'd put on top of my suitcases, after all."
Or, maybe it happened another way. "Somebody has suggested to me that maybe she was angry at her husband and threw it out the window. Who knows?" Bigger said. "I'm sure the girl will be happy to get the dress back even if she did throw it away."
When a Roanoke Times reporter starting calling bridal shops in Roanoke, the connection between the dress and the region began to seem a lot more tenuous, however - and it started to become clear that it may not have been a wedding gown at all.
The three shops who sell Mike Benet dresses locally - Amrhein's Brides Formals & Fine Jewelry, Bride's House & Formals, and Patina Bridal & Formal Wear - said they didn't recall having sold a Mike Benet dress for a wedding in quite a while. They also said it probably was a prom or pageant dress, not a wedding gown. None of the shops knew what the numbers on the dress meant, though some thought it could be a factory number for the dress style.
"It sounds like a debutante dress to me," said a store clerk at Patina who asked not to be named. "We sell debutante dresses for the VMI ring dance and military dances. More than likely, it's some poor deb who lost her dress and now is dying about it, but I don't see how you can lose a Mike Benet, because they're super-expensive."
Most of the Mike Benet dresses her shop sells start at $200 and can sell for more than $1,000, she said.
Judy Marshall, office manager for Mike Benet Formals in Pittsburg, Texas, added more information - and still another twist to the mystery.
The 333 on the label of the dress is the number of the seamstress who made it, Marshall said, and the 9028 refers to the style of the dress. One of the company's most popular designs of all times, the dress hasn't been made since 1985.
"It was a very good style in its day," Marshall said. "With some girls, it would be a gorgeous wedding gown. It could have come from anywhere through the years, since it's such an old style. It's probably somebody's old prom dress, and it could've been en route to Goodwill or any number of things."
But, personally, Marshall said, "I'd like to think there's a lot more glamorous story behind it than that."
"It gets a lot more interesting, doesn't it?" Bigger observed. She wonders now if the dress couldn't have been a keepsake or an older sister's dress cleaned up and borrowed for a special occasion.
The dress may not make it into her new book, she says, but she'll probably still have a couple of stories from Roanokers. (Such as Brenda Wujek's story about the hungry mouse who absconded with an appealing bridal bouquet, or Brenda Delbridge's story about the impatient bride who started her wedding without her fiance's sisters - and then found out her husband-to-be was with them.)
As for Crump, he said he wasn't sure what to think of this new information. He thought for sure he'd find the dress owner in Roanoke.
He doesn't know what he'll do with the dress now. He still hopes somebody will call him and claim it, but if they don't, he's thinking about offering it up for a charity auction on Labor Day.
"If this was a murder mystery," he said, "you'd be right back where you started."
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