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The story of the dress begins here.

In this house on a curving street in Meadowlane, filled with one-story ranches with carports and open floor plans.

Julie Lantz is feeling weepy in this house on Thursday, two days before her daughter’s wedding.

She’s missing her own mom. She’s wishing she were here.

"I need her today," she says.

Julie walks to the back bedroom, the room she once shared with her sister. The room that her children -- first Ashley and then Alex -- called their own after Julie and her husband, Duane, bought the house from her mom.

The wedding dress is on the bed, cocooned in antique tablecloths. Julie peels the fabric back to reveal an elegant ivory dress with capped sleeves and a scalloped hem and a simple waist, crocheted by hand.

It took her mom months to make the dress, Julie says, more than 100 hours of work.

Julie can still see her sitting in the living room at night, her lap covered with a white sheet, stitching the rows.

Ashley will wear it Saturday.

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It’s perfect for her outdoor wedding.

The way it was perfect for the first bride who wore it back in 1975.

And the bride who wore it next, and the bride who wore it after that, and the bride after that.

***

The dressmaker, Mary Harris, died in 1992, a heart attack at 68.

She was a young widow when she came to Lincoln nearly 30 years earlier.

She’d lost her husband, Louie, to lung cancer weeks after their last baby was born in Austin, Texas, where the Air Force family was stationed.

When the grief settled, the widow and her six children boarded a Greyhound bound for Nebraska.

Mary’s folks lived in Grand Island. And Lincoln -- a growing city and university town -- seemed a perfect place to start fresh.

Carla Hines was a new Realtor then, with six kids of her own. She and her husband, Charlie, lived just south of Vine Street in a new development teeming with young families.

Carla helped Mary search for the perfect house and they found it on Northborough Lane, just down the street from Carla and Charlie.

A happy coincidence.

The women became fast friends, talking nearly every day. And their kids became friends, too, spending summer days at the neighborhood pool.

Mary was a pistol, Carla says. And boy, could she sew.

“She was an incredible seamstress.”

She supported herself with a variety of jobs, Louie’s pension and her talent.

She operated Mary’s Knitting Nook out of her bedroom. She had a Singer and a French knitting machine and made clothes as lovely as the labels sold at Hovland Swanson’s and Miller & Paine.

She sewed for herself and for her kids. And one year, she surprised Carla with six new outfits for work.

“They all fit beautifully.”

Carla and Charlie’s oldest three were girls. Debbie, then Nancy, then Stephanie, followed by three boys.

In the winter of 1974, Debbie came home and said she and her boyfriend were getting married the following May. A week later, Nancy announced that she and her boyfriend were getting married the following May, too.

Carla made her own announcement: If they wanted a sane mother, something had to give.

And a double wedding was the answer.

Long before the invitations went out, Mary announced her gift to the brides. Wedding dresses.

Debbie picked a pattern right away, satin with a pleated bodice, and Mary started sewing.

But Nancy wasn’t sure, so Mary searched through her pattern books and magazines.

“She called and said she’d found the perfect dress,” Carla remembers.

And it was.

She shows the photo, two smiling brides in the dresses Mary made, standing on either side of their father, bouquets of daisies in their arms on May 31, 1975.

After the wedding, they washed Nancy’s delicate dress in the bathtub and dried it flat, careful not to stretch the yarn.

Then they covered it in tissue and packed it in a cardboard box and wrote on the lid with red marker: “NANCY R. WEDDING DRESS”

The next spring, Carla and Charlie’s daughter Stephanie got married in the dress Mary made.

Five years later, Carla and Charlie’s oldest son, Ed, got married and his bride, another Nancy, wore the dress Mary made.

Someone wrote on the box in black marker: "Nan Hart Hines also wore this dress."

And then it was Julie’s turn.

The dress her mom labored over fit like a dream.

A small wedding was held at the Sunken Gardens on Sept. 9, 1981.

The city didn’t allow chairs so they just invited close family, but people found out.

“There were so many people standing in the bushes watching,” Julie says. “Carla was in the bushes.”

***

She’ll be at Ashley’s wedding, too, Carla said Thursday.

She wouldn’t miss it.

She’ll watch the dress go down an aisle for the fifth time on a new, young bride.

Her son Ed is still married to Nancy. Her daughter Stephanie and Jim Moran have been married 39 years. Her daughter Debbie and John Russnogle celebrated 40 years in May.

Her daughter Nancy and Kent Reckewey had been married 27 years with two sons when Nancy died of breast cancer on June 3, 1992.

The couple met in junior high and started dating in high school.

Carla was speechless the first time she saw the dress on Nancy.

So was Kent.

“It was a one-of-a-kind dress,” he says, four decades later.

And he’s happy to know more than one bride and groom saw its beauty.

“We had such a happy marriage and a happy wedding, I couldn’t be more pleased that someone is still wearing it. I hope it gets worn and worn and worn again.”

***

Back at the house where the story of the dress began, things are getting hectic.

The bustle and excitement of a wedding. Tuxedos to pick up and nail appointments and details to attend to: flowers and food and photos.

They are taking these old pictures to the wedding, Julie says, standing in the living room.

Her grandparents on their wedding day. Duane’s grandparents. His parents.

Her mom and dad, smiling in black and white.

Louie in his Air Force dress uniform, dark hair slicked back. Mary in a silky blouse under a fitted jacket with shoulder pads.

Her parents eloped, Julie says. Maybe that’s why this dress was so important to her mom.

And to her.

It was Duane’s idea to bring it out of storage for Ashley’s wedding to Steve Albers.

“She had never seen any of the pictures of me in it,” Julie says. “So I made a call to Carla and she got the dress and came over.”

They opened a bottle of wine.

They opened the old cardboard box and found the dress neatly folded inside its bed of tissue paper.

The 26-year-old slipped it over her head.

The dress wasn’t too tight, or too long, or too itchy, or too dated, Ashley says.

“It still felt like the perfect dress.”

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