6. Nan and Richard Get Married

Hook, Line and Sinker

On October 15 1936, Nan married Richard C. Morenus (1894-1968) in New York City. She was about to turn 25 and he was 42. I do not know where or how they met, but it is likely they met in the radio world in Chicago  During the early 1930s Richard was president of the Morenus Advertising Agency in Chicago.

 

Movie poster from 1936, the same year Nan and Richard got married. 

 

 

 

 

 
 

Nan and Richard's marriage certificate. The officiant was George L. Luning, Justice of the Municipal Court in Manhattan. Witnesses were Sidney Koblentz and John J. Fitzsimmons, both lawyers.

 

The marriage certificate reveals some interesting information. Curiously, Nan recorded her name as her mother's name, Evangeline Hield Danke. Her mother's maiden name, Hield, was never a part of Nan's name. Her legal name was Annette Evangeline Danke. 

As for Richard, he claimed that this was his second marriage, when in fact it was his fifth. Nan and Richard were both working in radio at the time of their marriage - he in advertising then as a writer and Nan as a performer.

Honeymoon 

Honeymoon spot

Some of the best fishing in the state of New York was at Congers Lake on the west shore of the Hudson River, about 30 miles north of New York City. From an examination of the photos below, I determined that this is where Nan and Richard chose to spend their honeymoon. (The date and location are written on the reverse of each photo.) 

The newlyweds rented a rowboat and went fishing for bass and pickerel. Unfortunately, the only photographs that survive from the Morenus' honeymoon are the ones taken by Nan. There are no photos of Nan in the collection I acquired, so I have to assume they were destroyed by Richard or by his sixth wife Nora.

Richard Morenus on his honeymoon with Nan at Congers Lake, NY, October 1936. Photos courtesy Kim Clark and Richard Mansfield*.

Radio Fanfare, October 1933.

Nan's love of the great outdoors may have started on her honeymoon with Richard. "Few girls are good fisherwomen," an article in the Vermont newspaper The Landmark on August 18, 1938 states, "but Nan Dorland, who plays Kathleen in 'Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories,' is so good that she even insists on making her own trout flies and bass lures." The article goes on to say that Nan "tried forty original dry flies for trout fishing last spring and her bass lures, or bugs, are so good she's going to patent them." (I have not yet found any record of Nan's bass lure patent in the United States.)  

The Landmark, White River Junction, Vermont, Aug. 18, 1938.

*Kim Clark and Richard Mansfield are the owners of Winoga Lodge Island near Sioux Lookout, Ontario - the island that Nan and Richard Morenus lived on for six years in the 1940s. These photos were in a box sent to them by Randolph Trumbull, whose mother was Richard's first cousin. The Trumbull family came into possession of this box of photos after Nora Morenus, Richard's sixth wife, passed away in 1981. The collection was heavily culled - likely by Richard or perhaps Nora - to remove photos of Nan and any of Richard's other ex-wives. These photos are now in my possession. I would eventually like to donate them to an archives with an interest in Richard Morenus. 

  

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