John Armor featured in NYT wedding pages

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Benjamin Porter for the New York Times

Imagine my surprise this morning as I was flipping through my New York Times and happened upon a wedding-page feature on none other than John Armor, an unsuccessful candidate for WNC’s 11th Congressional District seat two year ago. Armor lives in Highlands.

Armor, quite the character, also has quite the wedding story. Here’s a snippet:

WHEN Michelle Mead met John Armor in 1972, she was in a Baltimore courtroom accusing her husband of assault and battery, and Mr. Armor, her husband’s defense lawyer, was cross-examining her.

So much for small talk.

Ms. Mead, only 21 at the time, was battle-weary and blunt. But she wasn’t blind. She recalled finding herself being “flustered” by her handsome blond adversary, “who looked like Robert Redford.”

Mr. Armor, then 29, was impressed by her clever and combative responses. But in the end he won the case, earning, he thought, Ms. Mead’s enmity.

So when her husband abruptly left the country within weeks, Mr. Armor was not eager to contact her about removing her belongings from the rental house she and her soon-to-be-ex had shared.

Ms. Mead, who had fled the house, was living in a dormitory at Goucher College in Baltimore, where she was a senior. She didn’t drive.

“You got the bum off, so you better come and get me,” Ms. Mead, now 57, remembered telling Mr. Armor.

“There was some justice in her accusation,” Mr. Armor, 65, admitted. When he showed up with his station wagon the next day, she was grateful — if not exactly happy — to see him. But as the Doobie Brothers played on the radio, they talked about his fledgling law practice, and a dream they shared of becoming drummers. Ms. Mead learned that he was a Yale graduate, had three children from a failed marriage and was a bit of a raconteur. Almost against her will, she decided he was charming.

“Even though she was furious with me, she didn’t act like she was furious, which surprised me,” he said.

And after seven hours of packing and three trips to her dorm, he realized he had no wish to wash his hands of her. “She was a fascinating, warm, delightful, funny, sexy woman,” he said. So he asked her out.

By the time she graduated from Goucher in the spring of 1973, they were engaged, and they moved onto a houseboat in Baltimore harbor with a spiral staircase and grand piano.

The engagement didn’t last, as you might have guessed. Each went their separate way until a couple of years ago, when Mead e-mailed Armor. The rest, as they say, is history.