After 50 years, a first bite of wedding cake

For making it to their 50th wedding anniversary recently, Ellen and Warren Barnett got a cake from her sisters.

Which was nice, considering that the Grant Park couple didn’t get to enjoy so much as a celebratory Moon Pie with their guests way back when.

Still … just a cake?

“They didn’t need anything else,” said Eleanor Mauldin, Ellen’s identical twin. “They’ve got everything.”

She’s teasing, as most little sisters (by 15 whole minutes) are wont to do. Truth is, everyone gave a lot to make the Barnetts’ golden wedding anniversary special, from the family members who helped organize the celebration in Thomaston, to the now-octogenarian pastor who married them the first time and came back to do it again.

But no couple can have “everything,” right? That all depends on your definition of the word. When it comes to the Barnetts, longtime owners of Barnett Performance automobile parts warehouse on Memorial Drive, “everything” means having a healthy sense of perspective.

When the young couple (both were 20) married on Dec. 7, 1958, it was on a Sunday afternoon, after the regular service at the First Baptist Church of Thomaston. They didn’t have a reception, which wasn’t all that unusual given the time and place.

“Fifty years ago, weddings were not nearly as big a show as they are today,” said Edwin L. Cliburn, 81, who’d been First Baptist’s pastor for a year when he performed Ellen Daniel and Warren Barnett’s ceremony. They’d started dating in high school, like many of the couples Cliburn married there with little muss or fuss over a quarter-century. “It was not uncommon for people to come to my home and get married in my living room. My wife would decorate the mantelpiece, and off we’d go.”

There were other, more sobering reasons. When the twins were 16, an automobile accident killed their mother; Ellen and several other family members were seriously injured. By the time her wedding came along —- not long after Eleanor’s, another sister’s and their father’s remarriage —- “It was ‘Oh, here’s another thing,’ ” Ellen recalled. “We didn’t want to impose on anyone.”

Instead, the newlyweds changed into their going-away outfits, and drove directly to Gatlinburg for their honeymoon.

OK, semi-directly.

“He stopped to pick up a part at a junkyard,” Ellen laughingly said of Warren, who was then a transmission specialist at a Buick dealership in Decatur. “That night, we only got as far as Gainesville.”

But who’s complaining? Certainly the Barretts never did, not even when their 50th was fast approaching and their two sons and daughters-in-law were casting about for appropriately elaborate ways to commemorate it.

“We thought maybe a big party up here or we’d all take a trip together,” said Kim Barnett, who works in the family business and will be married to elder son Glenn for 20 years come April. “I didn’t even realize until recently that they didn’t have a reception. I guess it would have been a better story if I had.”

Guess again. As it turned out, there was one idea, one place nobody had thought of yet: the place where “everything” had begun.

“I said, ‘I want to go home, I want to go back to Thomaston,’ ” Ellen recalls. “‘December 7 is on a Sunday. Let’s go to church and have all our families come back for a happy occasion.”

And so they did. The Barnetts, their children and grandchildren, Warren’s three brothers and their families, Ellen’s four sisters and their families, all went out to dinner in Thomaston on Saturday night and attended services at First Baptist the next morning.

Cliburn —- who as a young pastor had confusedly seen what appeared to be the same young woman with different beaus on successive Sundays (it was Ellen and Eleanor, accompanied by their respective future husbands) —- arranged for the current pastor to recognize the golden couple among the worshippers.

Then came the reception. There was an elegant buffet at The Woodall House, a Victorian-style B&B owned by old friends.

The Barnetts had brought along the piece of paper containing their original wedding vows, which Cliburn had signed and dated after marrying them on Dec. 7, 1958. Now Cliburn, a widower about to remarry in a few weeks himself, helped them renew their vows, and signed and dated the paper again.

Once again, the happy couple headed for Gatlinburg, detouring this time so Warren could check out a car he was thinking of buying. But not before they finally got their buttercream-frosted wedding cake from Ellen’s sisters.

They took the top layer home and put it in the freezer, much like newlyweds hoping for luck and longevity.

“I guess we’ll eat it on our 51st,” Ellen said.

“Milestones” covers significant events and times in the lives of metro Atlantans. Big or small, hugely celebrated or known only to a few —- tell us of a milestone we should write about at: jvejnoska@ajc.com or mail it to Milestones, c/o Jill Vejnoska, 72 Marietta St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30303. Please include your phone number and/or e-mail address.