As the Vietnam War escalated in 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson more than doubled the number of inductions as the Army needed more young men. To enable local selective service boards to meet this new quota, President Johnson signed an order on Aug. 26, 1965, that modified selective service requirements at midnight.1
One of the amended regulations made any man getting married after that eligible for the draft on the same basis as a single man. Broadcasters carried the unwelcome news about the loss of the often-used exemption or deferment precisely at 5 pm that evening.2
This set off alarm bells for Baby Boomers as more young men faced the prospect of going to Vietnam or immediately seeking a way to avoid the conscription call. Only a few hours remained to dodge the draft since men between the ages of 19 and 26 who got married later than midnight would be just as liable to the call as single men.
The answer was Elkton’s well-known marriage mill, many thought. So as the clock ticked all too quickly toward midnight on that Thursday night the phone at the Elkton Police Department started ringing incessantly. Within the first hour, the police fielded dozens of local calls and over 25 long-distance calls from anxious young men wanting to come here to get hitched immediately.3
A London paper, The Guardian, picked up on the sudden buzz in the historic, old colonial town. They said, “Those love calls were eventually turned over to the man who runs the fire alarm system at the police station.” They had called the marriage bureau, but the courthouse closed about the time the airwaves carried the newsflash so the only government agency answering the phone at that hour was the police department and the dispatcher at fire headquarters handled those calls for the two officers patrolling the streets.
Not wanting to waste precious time, many more headed hastily toward the county seat in Northeastern Maryland. Also, an hour or two before midnight, a charter plane with a couple aboard landed at Lovett’s Airfield, at the edge of town. No one had told the couple that instant marriages in Maryland had slipped away long before these young people were born, the Sun reported.4
“This true story . . . is proof of the power of legend and late moves,” the Baltimore paper editorialized. “The old Elkton marriage mill was modified by a 48-hour waiting law in 1938 and hasn’t been itself since; yet last year 8,000 couples nearly all from out of state got spliced in Elkton, whose name always seems to be popping up on reruns of romantic comedies of the thirties. What one wonders, did these bemused children think of as they took off again? Elkton had turned out to be a fable . . . Trailing clouds of disillusion they set out for more hospitable climes in search of a marriage mill, and arrived, we trust, too late to leap from the frying pan into the fire.”
They didn’t know that a change in Maryland law ended the town’s quickie marriages business years ago or as the London paper remarked, Elkton had “lately been polishing up its image.”
Still, the disillusioned hope to avoid Vietnam. It was only four o’clock in Chicago, three pm in Denver, and two o’clock in California. In Las Vegas, the marriage chapels were besieged with business, other papers noted.
