Four Lives in Tandem : Two Couples Married in Dual Ceremonies Celebrate Golden Wedding Anniversaries

These were a couple of marriages made in heaven.

It all started 50 years ago when Theodore Koopmans, now 76, decided he just couldn’t wait to marry Grace Mills. A new minister at the Community Presbyterian Church of La Crescenta, Koopmans was due a monthlong vacation and had his heart set on using it for his honeymoon.

Trouble was, Mills’ older sister, Eloys, who already was engaged to a Baptist minister, also wanted to get married in the summer of 1939.

So it was that one evening half a century ago, two red-headed sisters from Whittier married two young ministers at a double wedding that not only became the biggest event in Whittier that year, but also caught the attention of the world media.

On Saturday, the Parks and Koopmans, surrounded by friends, family, and a handful of members from their 27-member wedding party, gathered at Atherton Baptist Homes in Alhambra for a reunion to celebrate their golden anniversary, again in tandem.

Three generations of relatives flew or drove in from all over the country and Canada for the special occasion. In all, the afternoon reception drew about 700 people.

Fifty years ago, on Aug. 8, the wedding itself drew plenty of attention from the news media.

“It just had enough twist to it,” said Emmett Parks, 73, the Baptist minister who married Eloys Mills, now 72. “Two sisters marrying two clergymen.”

Practical Arrangement

In fact, it was a very practical arrangement. Parks married the Koopmans, after which his new brother-in-law turned around and married the Parks.

According to Grace Koopmans, now 69, her father had to sell a rental house in La Habra to help pay for the wedding and reception for 1,300 guests. Her mother made the sisters’ identical wedding gowns.

One thing they didn’t have to worry about was the fee for the ministers. As the story goes, Theodore Koopmans said with a chuckle while pointing to his brother-in-law, “He married us first and I gave him $100, then I married him and he gave me $100.”

After the Mills sisters decided to have a double wedding, they also began dressing alike whenever they were in public.

“We did it just for fun,” said Grace Parks, who is three years older than her sister. When the sisters and their fiances went to the courthouse for marriage licenses, Grace Koopmans said, newspaper photographers waiting to grab shots of starlets noticed the identically dressed women and took pictures of the foursome.

Worldwide Attention

News of their double wedding was distributed by wire services to newspapers all over the world, the sisters said. In addition to appearing in such local newspapers as the Whittier News and Hollywood Citizen News, the two couples were featured in out-of-state newspapers, including the Seattle Times and the New York Post.

Friends and acquaintances from China and India also reported hearing news of the wedding. A missionary in China who learned of the event wrote to his daughter in California asking if she knew the Mills sisters, Grace Koopmans said. The daughter turned out to be a friend of hers who was in fact at the wedding.

Reminiscing about the wedding has also become a cherished family tradition for the Parks and Koopmans. As they shared their memories one recent evening, they laughed and told their story almost as a team, with one person beginning a sentence and another finishing it.

“One of the things that made our two families close was there was a shared story,” said Sharon Daloz Parks. There are other common threads. Each couple has exactly three children and eight grandchildren. The Mills sisters became acquainted with their husbands at church summer camps and developed friendships after spraining their ankles--each under different circumstances.

As David Koopmans, 43, likes to say, his mother and aunt each met their husbands through the SASAP method: Sprain-Ankle-Snag-A-Preacher.

The two ministers have jointly presided at the wedding ceremonies for each of their children.

“We are ministers’ kids,” Sharon Daloz Parks said. “We wanted our own fathers to perform the ceremony.” Their uncle begins the ceremony and their father conducts the exchanging of vows, she said.

On Saturday, the reception table featured two matching white cakes and fruit plates. But the Mills sisters no longer were in identical outfits; Grace Koopmans wore peach and her sister was in a flowing lime-colored dress as they greeted a long line of guests.

Newspaper clippings and photographs of their wedding were displayed on one side of the room, and Eloys Parks’ wedding gown graced a mannequin near the reception table.

Marion Hanson, only 8 when she was selected to be candle-lighter at the double wedding, beamed as she helped serve coffee. Recalling her role then, she said, “I just remember it was exciting to be part of it.”