THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995              TAG: 9511120120
SECTION: LOCAL                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: HERTFORD                           LENGTH: Short :   49 lines

NOW THAT BILL COX HAS A JOB - HE'S ABOUT READY TO GET MARRIED RE-ELECTION TO HERTFORD COUNCIL PRECEDES NUPTIALS.

Bill Cox is a 75-year-old politician who looks enough like a merry cherub to be right at home on top of a king-sized wedding cake.

And that is just about where he'll be Nov. 26.

On that Sunday, Cox will marry Shirley Russell Burner at 2 p.m. in a private ceremony at the Cox residence on Grubb Street in Hertford.

Burner is the 63-year-old proprietor of a popular downtown Hertford restaurant where for years the town's daily political confections have been rolled into shape across the street from the courthouse.

``Nervous? Who, me?'' asked Cox, while trying to spell the bride-to-be's name Friday.

News of the impending nuptials created even more happy talk in Perquimans County than the fact that Cox beat everybody in sight last Tuesday when he made a political comeback in a run for the Hertford Town Council.

Like the towering courthouse trees and the old S-bridge across the Perquimans River, Cox is considered a roly-poly work of art deserving Hertford's historic preservation.

Among local Democrats, Cox's name usually leads all the others and for more than 20 years he was Hertford's mayor or town manager, rising to renewed civic heights on each Election Day until his retirement two years ago.

Cox even upstaged James ``Catfish'' Hunter, the famed Perquimans County big league pitcher. Hunter is memorialized with a modest plaque on the courthouse lawn, but Cox has 20 miles of arterial U.S. Route 17, most of it four lanes, named for him.

When the road was christened the Bill Cox Highway during former Gov. James G. Martin's GOP administration, state Sen. Mark Basnight, a Dare County Democrat, came over to lend panache to the ceremony.

``As you see,'' Basnight said, ``it only takes one Democrat like Bill Cox to draw a crowd of Republicans to Perquimans County.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by DREW C. WILSON, The Virginian-Pilot

Former Hertford Mayor Bill Cox and his bride-to-be, Shirley Russell

Burner, will be mixing business, marriage and politics when they

tie the knot Nov. 26. He's a new councilman. She runs a popular

restaurant in the shadow of the courthouse in town.

by CNB