Jean Byrd began working after the war, returning to the job she had before entering into service. When her brother returned home from his stint in the Navy, he brought along a friend. Bill Stewart.
You just don’t up and get familiar with a person. You have to learn something about them. If they’re nice, or you can be congenial, or get along with them. So I’m minding my business, going to work. I hate to say it, but they served me a drink that I just thought was light soda or something or other, because I was going to work. I wasn’t going to be home and talk with them. I was going to work. And they said, “You can’t go to work because we put something in that, and you just have to take the day off and go on.” Well, I didn’t like that. Because every day counted, right? Yeah, that’s what they did to me. So I didn’t go to work that day. I got to learn something more about him.
After he had been over a couple of times, Bill suggested that he and Jean might want to think about getting married near his birthday in June. It was May.
I said to myself, “This is moving in a hurry.” Well I had a sister who was supposed to get married in September. As time when on, I don’t even know how long it was, but come to find out he appeared to be nice and I didn’t know anything that was against him (laughs). I said, “Well, we’ll talk to Lina and Johnny.” I said, “It would be rough on my mother to have a wedding for them and have a wedding for us at another time too. What if we get together and have a double wedding?” And so it ended up, that we had a double wedding and got married.
This photograph comes from the collection of Jean Byrd Stewart.
Hinges of History 