July 21, 2008
This afternoon I photographed my dear friend's wedding at City Hall.  Mayor Gavin Newson officiated the long-overdue ceremony in his private office.

James L. Coran, 80, and Walter A. Nelson-Reese, 79 have been together for forty-nine years. They met on July 19, 1959 at the opera Don Pasquale in the Marine’s Memorial Theatre in San Francisco. They’ve been together ever since.  James is a native of Elmhurst, Illinois; Walter a native of Havana, Cuba, now a naturalized U.S. citizen. Each has served in the U.S. Army. Jim was an accountant/controller, and after Walter earned a doctorate in Genetics from U.C. Berkeley, he was a cytologist managing a lab in Oakland for the National Institutes of Health growing and identifying cells for cancer research. They’ve been retired from those professions for over twenty-eight years, but have dealt in California paintings as WIM Fine Arts until 1989-90. Except for numerous long voyages abroad, they have spent all of their years together in the Bay Area: San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Rafael and back to San Francisco. In the 1991Berkeley-Oakland firestorm they lost their home in Oakland and the largest private collection of California historical art, over 950 works.

I have the great pleasure of knowing Walter and James, and it was an honor to witness and document their wedding ceremony this afternoon.

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Portraits: Folio 2, Page: 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20; Folio 1

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© 2009 Ronald D. Henggeler. All rights reserved
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