Mary Ward, of Manlius, was 11 when her parents died. They were married in France during World War II: Mary's most powerful artifact was her mother's wedding dress, made of silk from a German parachute. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

For many years, the wedding dress and veil, wrapped in tissue paper, were stored in a cedar chest in Manlius. The dress was made from German Luftwaffe parachute silk that was recovered in France, the veil from gauze hospital bandages. Mary Leak Ward would open the chest sometimes to carefully touch that fabric, a complicated touchstone of deep love and sweeping loss.

Last week, she figured out where the dress and veil belong.

Her mom wore them on July 2, 1945, the day she married Mary’s dad in France. Dr. Glenn Leak was a combat surgeon during World War II. Nora McFarland was a nurse in the same operating room. Glenn ended the war as a captain, Nora as a first lieutenant.

They met in the late 1930s at Buffalo General Hospital, and they traveled to Europe as part of the 23rd General Hospital, a military unit staffed with medical personnel from Buffalo who treated soldiers wounded on the front lines.

Once the war was over and the Axis defeated, the couple went home to raise a family. Their romance — and their return — was a front page story in The Buffalo Evening News. Glenn Leak became a prominent oncologist. Nora eventually decided to leave nursing to focus on their four kids while they grew up. Maybe, later in life, she would have gone back to nursing. Mary never had the chance to find out.

“I wish I could have met them as an adult,” she said.

She was their youngest child, born seven years after her brother Ed, closest to her in age. In the early 1960s, her mother had a radical mastectomy after learning she had breast cancer — a form that Mary said would have been treatable today. The disease eventually metastasized into Nora’s spine. In the middle of that struggle, Mary’s dad — by then, the directory of oncology at Buffalo General — learned he had cancer in his neck and throat.

It was deadly. Mary has a copy of an article from The Evening News that describes how Glenn, a heavy smoker, immediately understood what was coming — simply by identifying a single nodule from his thyroid. He revised a medical lecture he had already prepared to reflect specifically on what that nodule meant, using his own fate as a teaching lesson for young physicians.

Not long before Christmas, in December 1969, Mary had her confirmation, a Catholic sacrament, in her father’s hospital room at Buffalo General. Her mother was there, in a wheelchair, able to attend since her own room was down the hall. Glenn Leak died a week later. Nora made it another seven months, before her death in July 1970.

Mary was 11.

Mary Ward, of Manlius, was 11 when her parents died of cancer in short succession in 1969 and 1970. The image shows them on their wedding day, in 1945, when they worked together in a medical field unit in France during World War II. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

Orphaned, she spent most of the next seven years living with aunts or uncles, until she left for college. She remains grateful to her relatives, but she understands now, particularly from the vantage point of her late 60s, how searing the sense of loss was for all of them.

Before the death of her parents, as she told me: “I was spoiled rotten.” That is really her way of recalling:

She was deeply loved.

Mary remembers sitting on her dad’s lap, after family dinners. She remembers how he would pick her up sometimes in late morning at Buffalo’s School 56, in the days when schoolchildren ate lunch at home, so they could share that meal with her mom. She remembers family drives to downtown Buffalo at Christmas, the lights and excitement of Main Street, the chance to see the department store Santas…

Even now, when she thinks of the Yuletide, it still begins with the simple, delighted presence of her folks.

Every memory she has of them — even during their years with cancer — involves love, grace and faith.

The romance of an operating room nurse and a combat surgeon was a front page story in Buffalo.

 And then, abruptly, they were gone.

All of that swept across her every time she touched that wedding dress.

Years ago, the dress and veil came into her possession. After her parents’ deaths, those family treasures went first to Mary’s older sister Sharon, who later passed them on to Mary, long before Sharon died from Alzheimer’s disease.

Mary did not wear the dress at her own wedding — it was not an exact fit — though today she wishes that she did. She met her husband Shawn, now an associate professor of psychology emeritus at Le Moyne College, when they were both undergraduates at Siena. By that time, Mary was staying in Buffalo with her brother Glenn, her oldest sibling, but was ready to start building her own life.

November will mark 50 years since Shawn and Mary met, on campus. They raised four children, including three girls — though, in the same situation as their mom, the dress did not fit well enough for any of them to use at their own weddings. The couple settled in Manlius in the 1980s, after Shawn took the position with Le Moyne.

Mary, trained as a chemical engineer, returned to college for graduate work at Le Moyne. She earned her teaching certification and became a chemistry teacher at Fayetteville-Manlius High School.

Mary Ward holds an image of her mother, Nora McFarland Leak, on her wedding day – in a dress made from the silk of a Luftwaffe parachute. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

She retired in 2021. Shawn retired from his own career, a year ago last May. They had talked for years about doing something special in their first free September since before they started kindergarten — meaning more than 60 years.

They used that chance to fulfill Mary’s longtime quest. Ten months ago, they traveled to the French town of Vittel, where the 23rd General Hospital Unit had been stationed with the Seventh Army in the closing months of the war. Mary studied the old clippings about the wedding of her parents, how the entire wedding party was all doctors and nurses from Buffalo, how the flower girls were the daughters of Vittel’s mayor in that crowded church, how the dress was made of whatever materials were available:

Meaning a parachute recovered on the ground that had been used by the Luftwaffe, the German unit of aerial warfare, while the veil was sewn together from bandage gauze.

Mary recalled the family lore, how her dad was an Episcopalian and her mom a Catholic, and how they both knew that Glenn’s family would undoubtedly object — and maybe even skip the service — if they were married by a Catholic priest in Buffalo.

So they waited until after the German surrender, and while Allied forces in Europe watched to see the outcome of the war in the Pacific – the Japanese did not surrender for another month – the couple took their vows at the Chapelle St.-Louis, or St. Louis Church, in Vittel.

The Wards went there last September. Mary brought some old photos, including one taken from the back of the church that shows the moment when her parents knelt at the altar. Sunlight bursts through the stained glass window and reflects off the floor.

Mary and Shawn Ward, standing at the same spot at a French church where Mary’s parents stood on their wedding day in 1945. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

Eighty years and two months later, she and Shawn stood in the same vantage point as the photographer and took an almost identical image.

The only thing missing was her parents — except she promises you this:

She sensed them there.

“I felt very robbed of not knowing them as an adult,” she said. “So to stand where they stood? I wanted to walk in their footsteps. I wanted to experience what they experienced.”

In the church, overwhelmed, she wept.

“Walking down the aisle of the church her mother walked … the trip was a dream that Mary always wanted to fulfill,” said Shawn Ward, who remembers how intensely his wife missed her parents on the day the Wards were married. “It was an honor to share this experience with her.”

Once she returned to Manlius, Mary knew what to do. In retirement, the couple is going through that difficult process of unloading “stuff,” and she thought long and hard about that wedding dress and veil.

In Buffalo, the war-time romance between this surgical captain and an operating room nurse had been a major story. Twenty-three years after the ceremony, when Nora was dying from breast cancer, The Evening News ran another long piece on Christmas Day about how the family still managed to find its way to joy during those hard times, accompanied by a photo of Nora and 9-year-old Mary.

Her dad grew up on Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, the beautiful thoroughfare lost to construction of the Kensington Expressway. She thought of how the entire arc of her parents’ romance involved Buffalo General, from the day they met until their deaths, all too young. She thought of how she still wears a necklace that holds the diamond from her mother’s engagement ring, and about the sense of closure Mary found in France.

The church aisle in France where Mary and Shawn visited last fall; Mary’s parents kneeling at the same altar on their wedding day, July 2, 1945. Credit: Courtesy Mary Ward

Most of all, she thought of the magnitude of her parents’ lives despite the short time they both had, how they both chose careers dedicated to healing, how they risked everything to help wounded soldiers in the war against the Nazis, how her dad came home to build a career in oncology while her mom channeled her own suffering into volunteer work with the American Cancer Society…

And how their legacy is still being lived out by their children and grandchildren, at home.

“This was a love story,” she said, “and look at all they generated.”

She realized what she should do with the dress and veil.

Mary contacted the Buffalo History Museum, located in the last surviving building from the great Pan-American Exposition of 1901. She described what she kept in tissue paper in the cedar chest, and she wondered if the museum would be interested in that donation.

“We’re very glad she did,” said Kristin Glaspy, the museum’s director of collections. Her organization welcomed the gift. The appeal, she said, was not only in the historic nature of a wedding dress salvaged from a wartime parachute.

“It was the story behind it,” Glaspy said.

Last Monday, 81 years to the month after her mom and dad were married, Mary gave the dress and veil to the Buffalo museum, confident those artifacts will be both protected and cherished. That decision was another part of the real gift Mary received 10 months ago, when – as both an orphaned child and a grandmother – she made the pilgrimage to France.

“It brought them to life,” said Mary of her parents, who helped her realize what goes on and what to finally let go.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...