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."