Couple Will End the Year in a Blaze of Wedded Bliss

They met at the county’s volunteer firefighting academy, fought the Laguna Beach fires together, and on Friday Irvine residents Laura Turpin and Bob Hutnyan will wed on national television.

The wedding of Turpin, 21, and Hutnyan, 37, will be part of ABC’s live telecast of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve ‘94” from Times Square in New York City.

“We’re both extremely excited,” Hutnyan said Monday night.

The couple met seven months ago, when she enrolled at the county’s PCF (Paid Call Firefighters) Academy in Huntington Beach, which trains volunteer firefighters.

“I was one of her instructors,” said Hutnyan, a firefighter with 21 years of experience who works at Station 26 in Irvine. “I was working an overtime shift one day at a different fire station than the one where I usually work,” Hutnyan said. Turpin happened to drop in at the station “to look at one some of the equipment she was required to know about” for her course work.

“If it hadn’t been for that shift I never would have met her. . . . I knew right away there was something special about her. After that, we started dating and she graduated from the fire academy.”

Turpin is one of about 600 county volunteer firefighters who are on call and complement the 600 or so full-time firefighters for the county. She works at Station 23 in Villa Park, but is trying to transfer to Irvine.

Both were among the 631 firefighters who battled the Laguna fires, which blackened 16,682 acres and destroyed 366 homes in October.

“We ended up fighting the fire in Laguna on the same engine,” Hutnyan said. “Laguna Beach was it for us. We were on the same engine, fighting the fire side by side.”

During the Thanksgiving holiday, the couple decided to marry.

Hutnyan came up with the idea to do it before a national television audience when he heard a radio interview in which Clark discussed marriages on television, Clark’s publicists said. He called Clark’s production company and the marriage was set for just before midnight.

“We’re kind of spontaneous, and this fits into our lifestyle,” Hutnyan said.

Turpin and Hutnyan will be flown to New York on Wednesday and will be the guests of the television production company at a hotel until the wedding, Hutnyan said.

He will wear a rented tuxedo donated by a Buena Park shop; she will wear a $10,000 wedding dress loaned by a Beverly Hills firm.

After the wedding, the couple will go to Disney World in Orlando, Fla., for a weeklong honeymoon, also paid by the production company.

“They’ve been very generous,” Hutnyan said. “It’s great.”