RON HENGGELER

July 22, 2008
A very special wedding at San Francisco's City Hall

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.
For more of my photos of San Francisco’s beautiful City Hall, go to: http://www.ronhenggeler.com/San%20Francisco/City%20Hall/City_Hall_Index.html

 

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