Bride late to Blizzard of '78 wedding but couple still married!

Before she was a Stengle, Shari Edwards was late to her own wedding, thanks to mother nature and lots of traffic on Heatherdowns.

"What Father didn't tell me was that Shari wasn't even there yet. She was stuck on the ice," her now-husband Tom said.

"What are you going to do? You're in your slip and high heels… well, he can't get married without me… he'll have to wait," Shari said.

Schools remained shuttered the week after the blizzard, and roads were barely passable. Tom and Shari's daughter Lauren heard all about the cabin fever.

"Everyone was so excited to go to the wedding, because they were stuck inside the house for days before. So everybody wanted to come," Lauren Guhl said.

That meant lots of wedding crashers. The new Mr. and Mrs. Stengle had 300 people at their reception, held at Brandywine. Here we are, four decades later.

"They've been together for so long, and they just have fun together," Lauren exclaimed.

Shari wasn't so relaxed the days before the ceremony.

"I called my mom and was screaming. We couldn't get out of the house and everything was going to be ruined," Shari said.

Tom says he was pretty relaxed before the honeymoon to Barbados.

"I didn't really care… we could get married some other time," Tom said. "OK, blizzard, we can get married some other time. Shari said 'oh no, we're getting married February 3rd' no matter what."

The couple got engaged after only six weeks of dating...

"And I kind of popped the question. And I didn't have a ring or anything," Tom said of the engagement, which took place on an airplane.

But here they are today. Maybe blizzards are a good omen on your wedding day....

"We made it 40 years. The day is still young, however," Shari said.

We also found the birth rate for Lucas County. The year after the blizzard, births increased by over 10%, almost 10,000 babies.