Huntington, Pennsylvania, Daily News, July 14, 1938
Before there was Rupert Murdoch and Wendi, his pie-spiking wife; before the celebrity sphere was all a twitter about 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison marrying a reportedly 16-year-old Courtney Stodden, there was Herbert David Boutall, 63, and his 16-year-old bride, Ann
Dubbed a “hot weather item,” in my father’s column on July 16, 1938, the item wasn’t about the temperatures at all. It was about a May-December romance that made headlines across the nation.
“Both of the characters in this February-December drama are white, but what of it?” my father wrote. “One newspaper carried a picture of the elderly Romeo lifting his youthful bride-to-be, just to show his retained strength.“
Boutall, a widower from Athol, Mass. is quoted as saying: “The only ones in the neighborhood who object to the marriage are a couple of old maids who think I should marry someone nearer my own age. My answer to them is that when I buy a piano I don’t want an antique. I want one that plays.”
“Boutall should be careful about making assertions about purchasing antiques,” Ebenezer wrote. “His young bride might awaken some fine morning to realize that she has done just that.”
In hindsight, Ebenezer might have taken his own advice about making assertions. Ten years later, he would end up in his own May-December romance. My mother, certainly no child, was only 22 years my father’s junior, which doesn’t come close to the Boutalls’ 47-year age difference. Still, it’s a reminder that you never know when your own words will come back to bite you, especially when you are talking about “old” people. .
I followed the Boutall marriage in the archives of the Boston Globe. More than 5000 spectators lined the streets for the wedding on July 11, 1938. The church only seated 120. In August, a subsequent Globe article intimated that the couple was thinking of selling their New England farm and moving to England, where Herbert was from. A year later, they were still in Athol, according to the Globe headline: “Farmer, 64, wife 17, will mark first year of marital bliss today.”
Then in May 1940, the Globe announced that the “May–December couple proud parents of a girl.” They had a son the next June, but, alas, on April 10, 1943, the Globe announced, “Gap of 47 years too much for Athol pair, so they’ve separated.”
The paper quoted Herbert as saying, “If she wants a younger man she can have one.” According to that Globe article, Herbert was headed to England to work in a war plant. His wife and children moved back in with her parents.
Perhaps she got a new piano.
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