Photos by Savage Frieze, wedding photo courtesy of Sally Carr and Larry Hannafin

By Andra Moss

Sally Carr and Larry Hannafin of Norfolk celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on Aug. 31, 2023. The couple eloped in 1963 to New York State, as the bride was a few months shy of the Connecticut minimum age of 21 to marry.

The pair first met as teens at a wedding on Roughland Road in Norfolk and felt an immediate connection. “Larry was very popular,” remembers Carr. “He worked at the Norfolk Pharmacy, and my friends and I would go in all the time. He made the best hot fudge sundaes and milkshakes. We sort of had a secret romance in Norfolk.”   

They kept in close contact during the four years that Hannafin was in the Navy and traveling the world while Carr was away at college. Immediately upon his discharge, the two married and set up their first home in a small furnished apartment in West Hartford. “Larry got mustering-out pay of $250 from the Navy,” Carr recalls. “That was our entire net worth.” She promptly spent half of their nest egg at an auction on 24 place settings of hand-painted china (“a positively gorgeous and rare hunt scene,” she is quick to point out). Arriving back at their third-floor walk-up with the 16 boxes of Wedgewood, Carr found that her husband was less enthusiastic about her purchase. “That was the first week we were married,” she says, “and we didn’t open those boxes for nine years. Not until we moved into this house in Norfolk.”      

The set, however, soon found a place of prominence in their historic home on Laurel Way, the story has become hilarious family lore and the unbreakable Hannafin/Carr union survived to flourish for six decades and counting.