The Wedding Dress That Dropped From The Sky

Editor's note: This article was first posted in August 2011. Patch features it again on what would have been the couple's anniversary.

When Claude Hensinger used his nylon parachute to cheat death after a bombing run in World War II, it must have looked like a thing of beauty to him.

But it took his future wife’s sewing skill to turn it into a thing of beauty to everybody else.

Hensinger was a B-29 pilot and the squadron leader of a crew in the 444th Bombardment Group of the 20th Army Air Force flying bombing runs over Japan. They were stationed in India, and they would “fly the hump” – over the Himalayas – in air strikes on the Japanese islands, according to his wife, Ruth Hensinger, a resident of senior living community in Township. 

On a mission in August 1944, the engine on Hensinger’s plane caught fire and the crew had to bail out over unoccupied China. They all survived and made their way back to their base. “Those who landed in occupied China ended up prisoners of war,” Ruth said.

Hensinger kept the parachute and mailed it home to his mother, who promptly dry-cleaned it to get out a bloodstain from when her son cut himself on rocks in the landing.  When the war ended,  Hensinger came home and started dating Ruth, whom he had known since they were children going to the same church, the Union Church in Neffs. 

About a year into their courtship, he gave her a box and said, “I’d like to have you make a wedding dress out of my parachute. It saved my life.”

And that was how he proposed.

She accepted happily but says she wondered: “How am I going to make a gown out of 16 gores of nylon, and all that bias?”

Ruth took some inspiration from a wedding gown she saw in the window of Hess Brothers Department Store in Allentown, crafting the nylon parachute into a many-tiered dress with an antebellum look. 

The result was stunning, and she wore it when she and Claude were married on July 19, 1947 at the Union Church in Neffs. “He didn’t see it until I walked down the aisle,” Ruth said. “He was happy with it.”

Twenty-five years later, her daughter Susan wore the dress on her wedding day and the Hensingers' daughter-in-law Kim Shollenberger wore it when she married their son David in 1989. “It went down the same church aisle three times,” Ruth said.

The Hensingers had been married for 49 years when Claude died in 1996.

In the early 1990s, Ruth learned the Smithsonian Institution was looking for things made from World War II era parachutes. She contacted a curator, who requested that she send the gown and veil. Ruth signed them over to the Smithsonian, which has displayed it in a number of exhibits, including most recently at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. There’s still a trace of Claude Hensinger’s blood from when he cut he himself on the rocks 67 years ago.

Was she glad she accepted his unusual proposal? “Certainly,” Ruth said. They had a great 49 years together, she said.

Information on the 444th bombardment group is available here.

Information on the display at the Smithsonian is here.