A third marriage, and the first of them: Betty Jane Saxa, 1963

Published here first. Stanley Meyer married three times, not twice, and the first of the three has never appeared in print about him until now: Betty Jane Saxa of Olmsted Falls, Ohio, married at Olmsted Community Church on Saturday 15 June 1963, when he was twenty-two and she was a senior at Ohio State. The evidence is two notices in The Plain Dealer, nine months apart, each with her photograph. Both are below.

What the archive said before today

Two marriages, on the family’s own authority. Lorraine, Meyer’s niece, speaking with his sister Barbara Ferret at Bremen in 2019: “Stan was married twice, but we never knew the second wife. Nobody in the family knew the second wife at all.” The first was Donna, with two children, and a daughter, Melissa, from before that marriage. The second was Marilyn Meyer, born Chambers — the wife named in the 1998 obituary, on the death certificate, and called over to the car in the road-test film. She lived in Bexley while Stan lived in Grove City.

That account is not wrong about Donna or Marilyn. It is short by one, and the one it is short by comes first.

The two notices

30 September 1962

Mr. and Mrs. Carl S. Saxa, 27127 Cook Road, Olmsted Falls, announce the engagement of their daughter, Betty Jane Saxa, to Stanley A. Meyer, son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry S. Meyer of Columbus. Miss Saxa is a junior at Ohio State University. Mr. Meyer attended that university and is a student at the Institute of Electrical Technology in Columbus.

16 June 1963

Betty Saxa and Stanley Allen Meyer were married yesterday at Olmsted Community Church. The bride is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Carl S. Saxa, 27127 Cook Road, Olmsted Falls. The bridegroom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Meyer of Columbus. Both are sen—

The clipping ends there, at the foot of the column. The wedding notice has a page of its own.

How good is this?

Good. A wedding notice in a metropolitan daily is not a rumour: the paper had the bride’s photograph, her parents’ names and street address, the church, and the day. It ran the engagement nine months earlier with the same names and the same address, so the two notices confirm each other. “Yesterday” in a Sunday paper makes the wedding Saturday 15 June 1963.

What the notices do not say is as important. They do not say how long the marriage lasted, whether it ended in divorce or otherwise, whether there were children, or what became of her. The archive has nothing on any of that and is not going to guess at it.

The question this raises

The family’s account has a daughter, Melissa, from before the marriage to Donna. Betty Jane Saxa is before the marriage to Donna. Those two facts sit next to each other and the archive is not going to join them: “before Donna” covers a decade and a half, and a niece recalling family history in 2019 is not a birth record. It is written down here because it is the obvious thing to check next, and because somebody with access to Ohio marriage and divorce records for Franklin and Cuyahoga counties could settle it in an afternoon.

Two other things in the engagement notice

His father’s name. Henry S. Meyer of Columbus. The holdings talk about the twins’ mother and about the house they came home to from the service; the father is named here.

Where he studied after Ohio State. “Attended that university and is a student at the Institute of Electrical Technology in Columbus”. The electrical training everything afterwards rests on has a name and a place, and the order is Ohio State first, the Institute second.

The photographs

The Plain Dealer photographed her twice: as Betty Jane Saxa in September 1962, and as Mrs. Stanley Allen Meyer in June 1963. Both are below, in that order. They are the only pictures of her the archive holds, and between them they are close to the whole of what it knows about her.

The original