Minnesota bride re-creates her parents’ 1950 wedding, starting with the dress

Molly Guthrey, Pioneer Press
·3 min read

When Carol Grant got a second chance at love, so did her mother’s wedding dress.

This fashionable love story begins in Australia in 2017.

Carol, now 70 and a retired lawyer from St. Paul, was on a guided tour. So was Robert Holub, now 83 and a retired Silicon Valley executive living in Portland, Oregon.

“The first day we met, I invited her out to dinner at the Opera House in Sydney,” says Holub. “Then, five years later, we got married.”

Must have gone well at the Opera House, eh?

The couple laugh.

“We like the same kind of things,” says Grant. “We’re both kind of cerebral.”

They also knew what it was like to start over: Grant had been married before, and Holub was a widower.

After the tour of Australia, the couple had a long-distance relationship for a while.

“It was like ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ without the cute kid,” Grant says.

After the couple got engaged, Grant got to thinking about her mother’s wedding dress.

“I always had this idea that maybe I’d wear it someday,” she says. “It looks like a dress that Deborah Kerr wore in the 1957 movie, ‘An Affair to Remember.'”

(That movie was also featured within “Sleepless in Seattle,” a prominent plot point.)

It was June 24, 1950, when Carol’s parents, Ardis Lauttamus and Gordon “Bud” Grant, were married at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis: Harry Truman was president. The Korean War was starting. Children were reading “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis.

Back then, it wasn’t uncommon to make your own wedding dress, and that’s what Ardis did — with some help.

“I know that my grandma and mother worked on it together, picking the fabric and sewing the dress,” says Grant.

The thought of that handiwork brought back memories of her mother.

“I remember she used to bring my sister and I along to Donaldson’s in downtown St. Paul, where we’d sit on stools in the pattern book area, pouring over the patterns we wanted to make and the fabric we wanted to use while she shopped,” Grant says.

Her father, who died in 2011, was a well-known journalism teacher at Johnson High School; her mother, who passed away in 2006, had a lineage that was fashionable.

“They were both good seamstresses,” Grant says of her mother and grandmother. “My mother was a commercial art major and had a highly developed artistic sense. My grandma sold shoes at Dayton’s in the Oval Room in Minneapolis.”

The wedding dress the women created together looked like something Audrey Hepburn might have worn in “Roman Holiday“: An A-line silhouette in a 3/4 length, it alternated gossamer layers of white and blush pink, and was dressed up with buttons, pearls and a bow.

“It’s a complex dress,” says Holub, with appreciation.

It also served as the inspiration to re-create other parts of her parents’ wedding, including the date: Grant and Holub were married on June 24 at the University Club in St. Paul. They also stayed at the St. Paul Hotel, the same hotel where the 1950 newlyweds stayed after their wedding. A honeymoon followed at Disney World as well as Mexico, where the 1950 couple honeymooned.

Some things were not the same, though, 72 years later.

“The prices are a little different now,” Grant says with a laugh.

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