After military deployment, North Aurora couple perfects the wedding proposal on the second try
By ERIKA WURST
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| U.S. Navy Equipment Operator 1st Class Walt Ripley and his wife Lisa pose for a photograph Wednesday in front of their North Aurora home. |
It would have been a normal lunch date for Walter and Lisa Ripley. Would have been a day just like any other that the couple who have worked together for 10 years piled in the car to grab a bite. Only this particular day three years ago was like no other.
“I got the phone call at lunch,” Walter said. He was being deployed to Iraq.
Walt and Lisa Ripley won this engagement ring in the 2008 Perfect Proposal Contest sponsored by the USO of Illinois and Robbins Bros. jewelry. They used it to recreate their proposal, which happened more than two years ago in a car during their lunch break after Walter received the phone call that he was being deployed to Iraq.
The Ripleys keep a photograph from their wedding ceremony in Santa Barbara, Calif. They eloped with some of Walter’s Navy buddies shortly after they learned Walter was being deployed to Iraq.
Walt Ripleys is seen in this photo taken during one of his tours in Iraq.
“He hung up the phone and said, ‘Hey, want to get married?’” Lisa recalled, the happy couple sitting together, finally, in their North Aurora home.
It was as quick as that. Walter would be leaving in 10 days. The plans of a Hawaiian wedding on the beach at sunset, doting family by their sides, had been put on hold.
“I’m going to Iraq,” Walter recalled. “There could be no billboard or baseball stadium proposals.”
Back at work, co-workers laughed. Where was Lisa’s ring? Did he really propose in the car?
“‘That’s not good enough,’” Lisa recalled them saying. So, Walter did all he could. He proposed again in a voice mail, and a text message, and an e-mail — trying desperately to make the abrupt occasion a bit more memorable. To Lisa, however, his hand in marriage was all she needed.
“I could get deployed,” Walter told Lisa two months earlier when they began dating.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, it could happen,’ but I’m not going to worry about it until it does,” Lisa said. “I was being naive. Within three months, he was gone.”
So just hours before Walter set off, the couple eloped to Santa Barbara, Calif., a few of Walter’s Navy buddies by their side, and then he was gone — but never far from home.
Keeping in touch
Letters were sent every day to Lisa and her children, Jonathon and Jordan from her previous marriage. Half-colored pictures ripped out of coloring books were airmailed for the kids to finish. Video of Walter reading the little ones children’s books from Fallujah found their way to the Ripley home. Christmas ornaments carved out of wood from the desert and simple notes proclaiming his love on scraps of cardboard boxes ended up in the Ripley’s Illinois mailbox on a daily basis.
“As long as you can write on it and print the word ‘free’ I’d send it,” Walter said. These were words of affection that went a long way for the new family, missing its “boss.”
After his second deployment, Lisa began to truly appreciate the things her husband went out of his way to do for her and her children, especially in light of all of the things he was witnessing abroad. He still found time to remember the smiling faces back home that needed to know he was OK.
“I love Walter’s creativity and thoughtfulness in showing us how much he loves us while he’s deployed,” Lisa wrote in an essay about her husband when she saw that Robbins Bros., which bills itself as the world’s biggest engagement ring store, and the USO of Illinois were hosting a 2008 Perfect Proposal contest. While Walter’s first proposal was a bit “corny,” as some put it, Lisa was determined to give her husband and herself the wedding and the moment they so rightly deserved. After 2 1/2 years of marriage, Lisa set out to make things right. “I’d love to surprise him at the airport when he returns in March from his second tour and show him how much I love him and that I’d marry him all over again,” she wrote in her entry.
Lisa won the contest. Walter also entered.
Arranged victory
He talked about how his wife is his “rock,” that 100 words or less would never be able to capture the essence of what she has done for him during his two deployments. He wrote about his botched proposal, and his dreams to rectify the situation. And, in the end. Walter also won.
While Lisa was in the states, waiting patiently, or not so patiently, as Walter put it, to find out what she’d won, Robbins Bros. was getting in touch with her husband in Iraq to set up the perfect proposal.
When he arrived home in April, Walter was whisked away to pick out the perfect ring, the one he never got around to grabbing before, and in a wonderful Mother’s Day tribute, he asked for his wife’s hand in marriage, once again. Only this time, the occasion was in a restaurant, and not a car. This time, Walter wouldn’t be leaving in 10 days. They didn’t need to hop on a plane and elope on a beach. Instead, they came home together as a family, children in tow, to a house where words of affection could be spoken, and not airmailed.
They still dream of the big Hawaiian wedding, and the honeymoon they never took. They still laugh about the day Walter initially proposed. But years later, it’s the little things that have become most important.
The photos sent home, the cards proclaiming undying love.
“When something like (war) happens, it puts things into perspective. You’re going to funerals and you feel kind of stupid talking about weddings,” Lisa said, but, after two and a half years of marriage, having the ring sure didn’t hurt. Especially since their love and devotion for each other earned it.
Original Article: http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com
