Who: Heather MacDonald ’59 and John Mallett ’55
When: April 3, 1961
Where: The Trinity College Chapel
Who else was there:
The ceremony was officiated by Provost Dr. Derwin Owen. The wedding party included Paul Bacon ’55 (best man), Penelope Linell ’57, Joan Groves ’56, Terry Keenleyside ’62, and Dorothy (Dot) Pointing ’62. Because John’s mother was the celebrated Canadian actress Jane Mallett, a Daily Star photographer was also on hand.
From the bride:
Our wedding date was Easter Monday, which meant that we could have our “honeymoon” during the week of Easter holidays, since we were both teachers. We spent that week in our new-to-us apartment on St. George Street, with John marking hundreds of exam papers while I cleaned the kitchen cupboards and tried to make this one-bedroom apartment into our new home.
The Provost, Dr. Derwin Owen, married us. At the reception, our best man, Paul Bacon, commented in his speech that this was the first lecture of Dr. Owen’s for which he had been on time.
The day of our wedding was cold, with some wet snow. John had decided that we should leave the chapel in a horse-drawn carriage, but our reception was 13 miles from the College. The time it would have taken to travel this distance by horse turned out to be prohibitive for this romantic idea to be feasible. The car to pick us up at the side door of the chapel was about 20 minutes late, so we stood there freezing, by the chapel door, which had by then been locked, feeling abandoned. Because John’s mother was the then-famous actress Jane Mallett, a Daily Star photographer was there to take a photo, with me looking distraught, holding my bouquet.
This April, as John and I marked our 65th anniversary, we chose to celebrate in the spirit of the season — inviting friends to donate to the Ottawa Food Bank in lieu of a party. To our delight, friends raised more than $2,200, with donations coming in from as far as Powell River, B.C. to Parry Sound, Ont. I can’t imagine a better party than that!
