"Wedding Bell Blues"

Not only do I love today's newspaper, I love yesterday's as well. I just love reading old papers, and with the internet, I don't get inky fingers from reading stories such as this one from 1924, when two really really rich girls eloped...

Don't bother with the magnifying glass; I'll tell you what happened. This Winthrop family from Lenox, Massachusetts, is American bigtime semi-royalty since they all climbed off the Mayflower or the next boat in. So here in 1924 was Grenville Lindall Winthrop, a lawyer and all-over rich guy, widowed, eighth-generation descendant of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts. Grenville had two daughters (Emily and Kate) whom he had tried to raise by giving them everything under the sun. 

They wanted more. They wanted love, which Grenville found out the day he caught thirsty Emily clapping cheeks in the chicken coop with the chauffeur (Corey Lucien Miles) who had apparently misunderstood Grenville's orders when he told Miles to drive his daughter around. 

And not only was Emily getting busy, so was her sister Kate, who took a fancy to Darwin Morse, who is described as both an electrician and the man who took care of the chickens around the mansion. I guess that made him a Chicken Tender!

Morse's mother wanted to help, so with the two girls 'n' guys, she helped cook up a scheme to get old Grenville out of the house for a few days, and then here comes the preacher man, and presto! Two weddings, and away those kids ran! And the preacher was quoted saying, “Well, they are nice young people—as nice as you’ll find anywhere these days.”

The next day, the headline in the New York TIMES said  

NEWS OF ELOPEMENT UNNERVES WINTHROP; Treated for Shock Due to Daughters' Marriage to Chauffeur and Electrician.

and that meant for a fun Thanksgiving that year. The couples took off separately - one "borrowing" Dad's limousine - and the next story I could find about them was from a year later, when the women were received at the family home and the grooms were not. 

I'm sure that many movies and TV shows have borrowed from this story, and I'm sure that in each of them, the guy playing poor old Dad is seen saying, "Now see here! This is highly irregular!" and calling for an aspirin and some bicarbonate of soda. 

My research couldn't answer my question as to whether Kate Winthrop was the person talked about in the 1922 hit song "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate." I'm sure Big Daddy's plans for his daughters did not include having them getting with "the help," and that makes the whole thing funny even now, a hundred years later, when they're all up in Heaven watching Glenville say "Hrrumph" about the whole sweet thing.

Grenville Lindall Winthrop
(1864 - 1943)