Marriage in a Model T, a Love Story

   

My parents were  married on December 27, 1931, sitting in the front seat of Daddy's

 Model  T! My mother said their first kiss involved the car, too. She described Daddy standing there in his overalls, getting ready to light a cigarette.  When he started to strike a match on the car's windshield, Mother told him he could not strike a match on glass. He bet her a kiss that he could, and he won!.He wanted to wait until she was 18 to ask for her hand in marriage. Three days after Christmas in 1931, they decided while eating Sunday dinner after church to ring up their best friends (Gertrude and Herod Bickerstaff) who were at Gertrude's family's  home feeding the preacher his Sunday dinner.  They told them they were  coming over and would like Brother Shuttlesworth to marry them.   

Gertrude and Herod had tied the knot a couple of weeks before, with  Mother and Daddy (Opal and Howard) standing up with them. So when they  heard the Model T coming on the red dirt road, the preacher and the  friends headed out to the car and started the ceremony before Opal and  Howard could even get outof the front seat!  Maybe Preacher Shuttlesworth couldn't wait  to get back to his fried chicken!

In 1927, after selling over 15 million Ford Model T's, the Henry Ford Motor Company replaced the Model T with the Model A. In 1928, the song, "Henry's Made a Lady Out of Lizzie" was about the new Model A. Its lyrics make the Model A into a female, and make much of the car's attractiveness: "Have you seen her, ain't she great? she's something you'll appreciate."  The song made fun of the rough ride of the Model T, and the bruises you'd get from driving one, then went on to favorably compare the Model A's features to the old Ford standard. The photograph below is of the piece of sheet music owned by Mother that became mine, so in 1931, others were already singing the praise of a newer kind of Ford.   But Opal and Howard never talked about the old car or the rough ride.  After all, that car was their wedding chapel.