Town On Cutting Edge For High-Tech Marriage Wardner’s Slick Web Page Made For A Virtually Unique Wedding

They say it was love at first write.

Jay Field and Shelly Schenbeck tied the knot - live and online - Sunday in Wardner, Idaho. The two cyber pen pals met, courted by keyboard, then married over the World Wide Web.

“There was just something in the wording, the way we looked at the world,” crooned Field, 46. “There was just a connection.”

That connection was electric from the start. Both were browsing through profiles on an Internet service for singles. Once they started exchanging e-mail in October, romance was just a mouse-click away.

“He faxed me pictures to my job down at Bend High,” said Schenbeck, 48, who lived in Bend, Ore. “I just knew I liked him really well. We were soul mates.”

She rushed him a card.

“She was pretty much exactly how I pictured,” Field said.

He drove from his home in Moscow, Idaho, to Bend to meet her in person. “Soon,” sighed Field, “we were just madly in love.”

But what about their distant jobs?

Field is a purchasing manager at Washington State University in Pullman. Schenbeck is a school-to-work coordinator. Jobs like that are scarcer than an Apple II Plus.

That is, until Field spotted a newspaper ad for a school-to-work coordinator at Pullman High School. “It was like some hand of fate had written the ad,” he said.

She got the job, and they decided to marry. A Pullman school counselor knew the perfect place - Wardner, home of the marryin’ mayor.

Chuck Peterson has reigned over the town for 20 years. At 64, he’s merged the files of about 25 couples. “Like a preacher, a justice of the peace, whatever ya call it,” he said.

Peterson was the first to wed a couple in a Silver Mountain gondola.

“The electricity didn’t work,” the mayor said. “I had to use a cigarette lighter so the people could read their verses.”

Wardner was the perfect spot for another reason - although only about 200 people live there, it has one of the slickest home pages on the Net. It plays bucolic music and shows live camera footage of the front porch of the mayor’s gift shop. Usually, all you see is Peterson sipping coffee.

But Sunday, users could call up the porch wedding at 4 p.m. Schenbeck’s sister had a computer party in California to celebrate. About 30 others caught the Web wedding, too.

‘I didn’t believe I would ever meet anyone that was right for me,” said Schenbeck, who has moved to Moscow. “I still can’t believe it.”

As for Peterson, he doesn’t quite understand all that Web stuff - it’s maintained by volunteer John Shovic. But he’s pleased all the same - 5,600 people have landed at the page since 1996.

“I do crazy things out on the porch to make sure people know Wardner is still alive,” the mayor said.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: FINDING WARDNER “I do crazy things out on the porch to make sure people know Wardner is still alive.” Mayor Chuck Peterson The crazy doings can be viewed at http://www.nidlink.com/signworks/wardner.html