Even before the phone rang, Deana Rivers, who works beside me in the Lifestyle department, asked if I was writing the story. Yes, I said, if we get enough response.

Wait until you hear about mine, she said.

“It was a day neither one of us will ever forget,” she said of her Dec. 28, 1996, wedding to Chad Rivers. “It was the happiest day of our lives, but it was also one of the scariest.”

Deana Kimbrell was scheduled to marry her high school sweetheart at 5 p.m. at Grace Lutheran Church. The wedding party was supposed to be at the church around 3 for wedding photos, and Deana arrived a few minutes after.

At 3:30, with her husband-to-be still not there, she began to worry. Her fears were confirmed when a man stopped by to tell them that Chad and his passenger, Deana’s brother, P.J., had been in an accident on Briggs Road. A motorist had cut in front of them to turn onto a side road, causing the collision.

“When they told me, I just broke down,” Deana said. “I felt my heart sink to my stomach, and I didn’t know what to do. They had to help me down the stairs because I couldn’t walk, I was so shaken up.”

Deana’s first reaction was to go to the hospital, but members of the wedding party kept her at the church while her mother, Chad’s parents and brother and his brother’s girlfriend went.

The ushers also left, with one of them promising to call Deana as soon as he found out something.

“It was close to 5 o’clock before I heard anything,” she said. “People had already started arriving for the wedding.”

The usher called and said Chad was being treated at the hospital, but he didn’t know anything about the extent of his injuries. “As he got more information, he said he would call me,” she said.

Deana said she wanted to hear from Chad before postponing the wedding. The minister told the guests waiting in the sanctuary about the accident and that he would let them know as soon as there was a decision about the ceremony.

“Nobody left,” she said. “Everybody stayed.”

In the meantime, Deana’s mother had asked Chad at the hospital what he wanted to do.“He said there was no way he was going to postpone it,” she said. “He was going to be there no matter what.”

At a quarter to 6, the usher who was keeping Deana updated called and said Chad and the rest of the wedding party were on the way to the church. “Tell everybody to get everything ready,” she said he told her.

Deana waited anxiously to see Chad and her brother, who was going to escort her down the aisle.

“I was just fine until I started walking down the aisle and I saw Chad standing down there all beat up,” she said. “My brother limped down the aisle. That’s when my emotions broke loose.”

When Deana got to the front of the church, she said she grabbed Chad and hugged him as tight as she could. “When I did that,” she said, “you could hear everybody sniffle in the congregation.”

Chad went through the ceremony in socks. His left ankle was broken, and the swelling prevented him from wearing shoes. His tuxedo pants had to be cut off after the accident, so he was wearing regular black pants.

“His nose was bruised from we’re guessing where the air bag came out and hit him in the face,” Deana said.“His hands were cut up real bad, and his knee had to have stitches. The whole left side of his body was just black and blue.”

He and Deana had just finished exchanging rings and were getting ready to light the unity candle when a piece of glass fell out of his hair and into her hand. “It was a piece of glass from the windshield,” she said.“I kept it and put it in our wedding album.”

One of the ushers sang “Surely the Presence of the Lord is in this Place” during the lighting of the unity candle. “That was very appropriate,” Deana said. “That’s when everybody started crying. There weren’t many dry eyes in our wedding.”

An air cast on his ankle allowed Chad to stand through the ceremony despite the pain. The emergency room doctor had put the air cast on because a hard cast would have meant postponing the wedding.

After making it through the wedding pictures, Chad was able to sit down during the reception and spent his honeymoon at Myrtle Beach on crutches. “He waited until we got back to cast his ankle,” Deana said.

Today, she said, Chad’s ankle still looks bruised and hurts him sometimes when he’s on it a lot. They celebrated their third wedding anniversary last December and are presently building a new home on Weaver Road.

“I believe I’ve got it,” she said.

“First of all, the photographer we hired forgot to put film in the camera so Ihad no pictures,” Tracy said. “The woman who was supposed to play the music never showed up, so I didn’t have any music.”

And when she got ready to put on her new shoes to walk down the aisle, Tracy said she pulled two left shoes out of the box. “When I had bought them, Ionly tried on one of them,” she said, “and I didn’t happen to really look.”

Her mother called her brother and asked him to go by the house and get an old pair of high heels for the ceremony.

Tracy’s son, Michael, who was 3 at the time, was supposed to walk her down the aisle with her father. They had had him fitted with a little tuxedo, she said, but he wouldn’t wear it and ended up walking down the aisle in a stained T-shirt and some jogging pants.

“Everybody thought it was cute,” Tracy said. “They could hear him loud and clear. He was back there screaming and pitching a fit and wouldn’t put on his tuxedo.”

Then, when it seemed as if things couldn’t get worse, Tracy said the minister called her husband by the wrong name during the ceremony. “My husband’s name is Tony Welton Hall, and he called him Tommy Walton Hall,” she said, “so I don’t even know if I’m legally married.”

The wedding was a disaster, Tracy said, “especially right after we got married, the preacher said, ‘Let’s just clap for them because the woman did not show up to play the Wedding March.’ So we just had to walk down the aisle with people clapping for us.”

Despite their rocky start, the Halls, who live on Hartley Road, have been married for almost seven years. Michael is 9 years old now and has two sisters, 5-year-old Mallory and 3-year-old Samantha.

Tracy is a stay-at-home mom, and Tony works for Boral Brick in East Spencer.

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Rita Honeycutt called with the story of her wedding on Feb. 18, 1979, made memorable by the 18-inch snowfall that covered Rowan County at the time.

“We can laugh about it now, but it was crazy then,” Rita said. “When we get our pictures out and show them to the children, they can’t believe how much snow there was that day.”

Neither could Rita Miller when she awakened on what was supposed to be the happiest day of her life.“Starting that morning, a snow blizzard came in,” she said. “It was the biggest snow that Rowan County had had in like over 50 years.”

The phone started ringing early that morning. “People were calling and saying, ‘Please cancel, we can’t get there,’ ” she said. “We’ve looked forward to this for the last six months.”

Stanley Honeycutt, who goes by “Stan,” called his bride-to-be several times to talk about what they should do. “The parents were saying, ‘We’ve got to do something with the food and everything,’ ” she said.

So they decided to go ahead with the wedding. The flowers were frostbitten and by the time they got to the church, Rita said, they all looked dead. The soloist never made it to the church because there was even more snow where she lived.

There were to be eight attendants and ushers in the wedding, but when it was time to start the ceremony, Rita said half of them were missing. The wedding was delayed an hour while the best man and the father of the bride left in four-wheel-drive vehicles to pick them up.

“We were finally married on that day,” she said. “We had prepared for about 300 people, so you can imagine how much food we had left. When it was all said and done, we had about 100 people that showed up.”

Most of them either lived within walking distance or got there in four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Ironically, a quote on the back of the wedding bulletin read, “Love can prosper in all types of weather as long as it’s planted by two hearts together.”

“It was a very emotional day,” Rita said. “We would laugh one minute and be crying the next.”

Instead of throwing rice when she and Stan were leaving, the guests threw snowballs. And hoping for a fast getaway, they arrived at their car to discover that the doors were frozen shut.

Their honeymoon plans also had to be changed. They were headed north, she said, but because of the weather, they went in the opposite direction.

“When all was said and done,” she said, “we said if we can survive that, we can survive anything.”

So far, they have. The Honeycutts have been married for more than 21 years.

They live in Corbin Hills and have two daughters, Megan, who just graduated from North Rowan High School and is going to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she will play basketball, and Mallory, a rising seventh grader in the Rowan County schools.

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Nancy Gokey of Whitney Lane called about her wedding in August of 1989, even though she was living in Wisconsin at the time.

“Two things happened,” she began. First, Nancy was ready for the wedding except for putting on her dress when she picked up her 1-year-old niece, Caitlin. “And she peed all over me,” she said.

Nancy had to clean up and get dressed all over again, but she still made it to the church on time. “My mom kind of lost it,” she said, “but thank goodness I didn’t have the dress on. It was something that could be fixed.”

One of the traditions in Wisconsin is for the wedding party to ride around after the ceremony blowing the horn. Nancy and her husband, Mark, and several members of their wedding party had borrowed a limousine from her brother-in-law’s father-in-law, who owned a funeral home.

The driver blew the horn continuously on their way to the reception, and the drivers of the cars behind them followed suit. When the limousine driver stopped blowing the horn on the bridge leading across the state line into Iowa, Nancy said they noticed “the car behind us kept honking, honking, honking.”
As it turned out, the driver of the car was trying to alert them to the smoke billowing from the limousine. “We didn’t know anything was wrong with the car,” she said. “We just had to wait a little while while somebody went and got another car. We made it to the reception on time.”
Today, almost 11 years later, Nancy and Mark live in Salisbury. His job with Bechtel Construction, which is based at KoSa, brought him here, and she is a stay-at-home mother to children Mackenzie, 7, Delaney, 5, and Reilly, 2.

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Dawn Martin Shores mailed a written account of her weird and wacky wedding at Grace Lutheran Church.

“April 27, 1980, was a beautiful day except for the tornado warnings,” she wrote. “We never suspected that anything unusual was going on behind our backs that day.”

What Dawn did notice was that her best friend and maid of honor, Kathy Silliman Bunton, was not acting like herself.

“She normally was an extremely happy person with a beautiful smile,” she said,“but for some reason she could not be happy on this particular day. I thought that she must be a little nervous about the weather, since she had always been one to look at some things as ‘bad signs.’”

Dawn and her husband, Kelly, didn’t find out until after their honeymoon that everyone involved in the wedding was trying to hurry up and get the ceremony over with so a funeral could be held at the church.

A former member of the church had died, and the bereaved family members had tried to get the parents of the couple to change the time of the wedding so they could have the funeral earlier. “Talk about bad signs,” Dawn wrote.

When the wedding director said something at the rehearsal about hurrying up with the ceremony so they could have a funeral, Dawn thought she was joking. And when she needed some air and tried to open a window while getting dressed before the wedding, someone had jumped in front of it and said, “No.”

Dawn never saw the grave being dug outside the window. “Nor did we notice when the funeral home van arrived as we were having our pictures taken,” she said.“As we were getting in our car to leave, our wedding flowers were being rushed out so that the funeral wreaths could be put in their place.”

A friend later told Dawn the day was a first for her. “I have never been to a wedding and stayed for the funeral that followed,” she told her.

Today, Dawn and Kelly Shores live on Grace Church Road and have two daughters, Amber, 18, and Lauren, 17. They have been married for more than 20 years.

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The first person who called, Becky Brown of Cleveland, and another who wrote, Shirley Ludwick of Cliff Eagle Road, told stories of weddings so weird and wacky that the Post ran stories about them when they happened.

The first, the Feb. 3, 1996, wedding of Becky’s son, Scott Brown, and Heather Wilson, was held in a church without lights or heat in the aftermath of a major ice storm. The headline of the story about the ceremony at Lebanon Lutheran Church read, “The bride wore wool socks.”

Despite the treacherous roads, there were still 50 guests, Brown said. Most out-of-town guests stayed at home, though one determined group from Florida made it as far as Charlotte.

Scott and Heather celebrated their fourth anniversary this year. They live in Cleveland and have a 20-month-old daughter, Mikaila.

As for Becky, she told her other two children, daughters, that neither of them would be allowed to get married in February.

“The 25-year-old is getting married Dec. 20,” she said, “so we’re holding our breath. If it happens, it happens. The guy she’s marrying is from Pennsylvania, so they’re used to bad weather, but not ice.”

Shirley Fuller Ludwick sent a copy of the article Rose Post wrote about her surprise June 12, 1999, wedding to Dale Ludwick. The headline read, “Cookout turned into big event.”

According to the article, Shirley Fuller and Dale Ludwick invited 100 or so family members and friends to a Saturday night cookout at Shirley’s place, then surprised them all by announcing that they were getting married, right then and there.

A framed copy of the article hangs on Shirley’s office wall. “When people come in and see it,” she wrote, “they still remember and ask, ‘Was that you? That was the neatest wedding.’ One man even remembered I would soon be having an anniversary.”