Guests show up at wrong wedding shower

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By Bill Wundram | Wednesday, April 23, 2008 12:52 PM CDT | () comments

SUCH odds! This could only happen in the willy-nilly Quad-Cities … a merry mixup of guests going to the wrong house for a baby shower, and staying until they caught on that it was the wrong house, and the baby shower where they were supposed to be was right next door.

Kay Ungurean’s husband, Karl, had printed off MapQuest directions from their home in Davenport to a difficult-to-find location in the hills of East Moline. She and Patty Barnard headed off to a baby shower for Stacey Brown.

They found the location without a problem. There were cars all around, and happy people were going into the house, carrying ribbon-wrapped gifts. Two of their friends, Trish Arnold and Jean McGee who also were invited, spotted them. They followed along. It seemed like everyone was going into this house.

“We put our gifts on a pile with the rest of them. Everyone was so friendly. We visited, had a cold drink, but were puzzled by how we didn’t know any of the other guests,” Kay says.

And they wondered where Stacey and her mom, Nancy Tredrea of Port Byron, were at.

“We just figured they were in another level of the house. After a half-hour, we finally caught on. We were at the wrong address,” says Kay. “The baby shower where we were at was next door to the one where we were supposed to be. We apologized, gathered up our gifts, and hurried next door.”

There, Nancy and daughter, who is 36 weeks along, were waiting with other guests.

“They wondered where we were. We got a lot of teasing,” Kay says.

‘Take a number, please’

“I am not making this up,” says Brian Downey. “I went to the Scott County General Store (a place where lots of county business can be conducted). I was the only one in the place Monday afternoon and went up to the front desk. They said I had to take a number.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m the only one here!’ They were as serious as a heart attack and said, without smiling, to go back to the machine and take a number. I pressed the button and it spit out No. 767. Then, over the speaker system it said, ‘767’ so they called me to the front. I was laughing my rear end off about this, but they all had straight faces and did not see how ridiculous this was.”

So long, it’s been good to know you

Times change; signs, too. Tuesday afternoon, they were installing a big new sign, “Modern Woodmen Park” at what most of us still remember as John O’Donnell Stadium. It covers the carved-in-stone, “Municipal Stadium,” which the place was called in the 1930s. In 1970, the original baseball stadium lettering was covered with a big sign calling it O’Donnell for the ageless sports editor of this noospaper.

The whiffs we remember

A column on Saturday on long-gone Quad-City smells gets reaction from Carol Schafer. “As a kid, I’ll never forget the smell of smoke from steam engines, chugging up the west Davenport grade between Fejervary Park and Cedar Street.”

Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.