Harold and Velma Revell eloped on Oct. 2, 1936. Seventy years later, on Monday, Oct. 2, 2006, family and friends held a wedding reception for the Revells at the Emporia Senior Center.
Susan Riley, director of the center, said that the couple’s daughters, LaRetta Small of San Diego and LaJune McCrea of Houston, last month had called the center to inquire whether they could bring a wedding cake in honor of their parents’ 70th wedding anniversary.
“Then they told me how (the Revells) eloped and never had a reception,” Riley said.
Soon, Riley and friends had made plans to turn the celebration into a full-fledged wedding reception.
“We just threw together a wedding reception,” she said. “Their daughters never knew about it until this morning.”
By noon on Tuesday, all the accoutrements of a traditional celebration sat hidden behind large screens in the dining room.
“Here’s your wedding reception 70 years later,” Riley told the surprised couple as the screens were moved away. “Your daughters brought a wedding cake. Here’s your candlelit aisleway and your mints and your nuts and your punch.”
Riley had borrowed a white tiara and veil from Madelynn’s, and brought in a bridal bouquet and boutonniere, which also had been missing from the wedding in 1936. Six candelabra stands formed an aisle leading to a three-tier wedding cake surrounded by plates and silverware.
Another friend supplied a garter that Mrs. Revell slipped on over her slacks, and which Mr. Revell removed after a brief cake-cutting ceremony.
“That’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time,” Mr. Revell said after he and his “bride” carried out the traditions they had missed after the ceremony in 1936.
The couple met in Newton, where Velma was studying nursing and working at the Axtell Christian Hospital.
“I came up to see my sister and that’s where I met my wife,” Mr. Revell said.
The courtship progressed despite the restrictions placed on Velma’s extracurricular activities.
“They were real strict with nurses back then,” he said. One night each week, she could stay out until 10 p.m.; the other six nights held curfews of 9 p.m.
Harold proposed to Velma after a late-summer dinner out. Before taking her back to the dormitory, the couple strolled to a park across the street, where he asked her to marry him. They waited about a month before eloping. They had to delay the honeymoon, although not nearly as long as the reception.
“I had to go back to the hospital and work, but we made up for it” with a belated honeymoon trip to California, Mrs. Revell said.
The marriage effectively ended Mrs. Revell’s plans to graduate. She was near graduation, Mr. Revell said, but the nursing school frowned on married women as nursing students.
Mrs. Revell adapted to the change quickly by becoming involved in a wide range of activities. She has been a church pianist, an accomplished ceramics artist with a kiln in her home, a Girl Scout trainer for many years, and for a time she traveled as a nurse with missionaries.
“I had a good time,” she said; “I traveled all over the country.”
Mrs. Revell also worked with her husband in their shoe stores.
Mr. Revell had been an assistant manager for a J.C. Penney store in Newton before he was drafted into the Army during World War II. After the war, he was helping his former manager, who’d had a stroke, on a dairy farm outside Newton. There, he met one of the owners of the Wiley-McCall shoe store and began a career that soon culminated in a partnership and multiple stores across the state. The couple moved to Emporia with their daughters in 1951 to open the Revell-McCall Shoe Store, he said. By 1983, when they retired from the business, there were stores in Manhattan, Newton, Pittsburg, Lawrence and Emporia, and three in Wichita.
Together, the Revells have been an active force for the betterment of the Emporia community. As they reflected over the years since they married, they talked about the longevity of their partnership.
“I think it’s just a matter of giving and taking,” Mr. Revell said. “I don’t think we go to bed mad at each other. I don’t think we ever did.”
The couple was joined Tuesday by daughter LaRetta Small and her husband, Tony; their son, David Small, and his wife DeDe; and Terra Small, one of the Revells’ eight great-grandchildren.