The Buckboard Proposal — A Fifteen-Year-Old Bride
'Well Mabel, isn't it about time we got married?' She said her father would never allow it. She was wrong — and the family got its chronicler.
Ed Plaskett was in his thirties. Mabel Sands was fifteen, riding to school.
One day, driving the two-horse buckboard, Ed turned to her and said: “Well Mabel, isn’t it about time we got married?”
“I was never so shocked in my life,” Mabel remembered. She had never once thought of Ed romantically. She laughed nervously: “My father would never allow me to marry you, Ed.”
“Well,” he replied, “if your father would allow me, then would you marry me?”
Convinced her father’s wise judgment would never consent, she answered sarcastically, her reddish hair tossing in the wind: “Oh sure I would. But he’d never allow it.”
Ed went straight to her father and asked for her hand — and to Mabel’s shock, he consented; family tellings add that talk of Plaskett gold did the persuading. Trapped by her own words, she married Ed at St. Luke’s Church in Jolon on September 28, 1911 — the church his uncles had built.
She would later say the early years were difficult. But she endured, raised seven children, and became the chronicler who preserved the Plaskett family’s stories — including, with a wry smile, this one.