The Bride Turned Him On When Love Was on the Air

Chicago’s WGN-AM radio included an “I do” or two as part of its regular “Al and Ed Show.” Tom Harley and Sheryl Joy Kelly, radio listeners who first spoke to each other on the air during a trivia contest on the show in April, exchanged wedding vows on the program. Harley, 37, and Kelly, 36, were married in the downtown radio studio as 50 invited guests and about 100 bystanders gathered in the rain on the sidewalk outside the station’s “showcase window” to watch the ceremony inside. “When I heard Sheryl’s voice on the air, I knew I had to meet her,” Harley said. He said he got Kelly’s phone number through a friend and contacted her. A phone call to program host Al Lerner to tell him of the engagement resulted in the station’s offer to broadcast the wedding, Harley said. All wedding costs are being paid by advertisers, a station spokesman said.

In another wedding ceremony, an African National Congress guerrilla leader serving a life sentence in Cape Town, South Africa, was married in Pollsmoor Prison. Wilton Mkwayi, 74, who has been jailed since he was convicted in 1964 of sabotage, married 63-year-old Irene Mkwayi in a service conducted by Anglican Bishop Patrick Matolengwe. Mrs. Mkwayi’s sister, Mavis Ngwane, one of two witnesses at the wedding, said the couple were allowed to kiss before and after the service. They were married by proxy 20 years ago in a ceremony held without the groom’s presence in the black homeland of Transkei. They wanted a Christian service and recently received permission from prison authorities for the ceremony.

Jean Millman, an only child, had always wanted an older brother. So she was delighted when New Jersey’s Burlington County Superior Court Judge Donald Gaydos granted Millman’s 83-year-old mother, Eleanor Berryman, permission to adopt 53-year-old construction worker Raymond MacDonald. Millman and MacDonald, who was also an only child, have been close friends since high school. “He’s always been like a big brother--someone to talk to about your problems, just what I thought a brother was always like,” Millman said. They came up with the idea of having her mother adopt MacDonald after the recent death of his father, she said.