Personal Life
Bridges divorced his second wife, Nancy Fenton Berdicio Bridges, a onetime professional dancer, after eight years of marriage, they had one child.
Bridges met Noriko Sawada during a fund-raiser for mine, mill, and smelter workers, and the two became a couple. In 1958, the couple decided to marry in Reno, Nevada. At the county courthouse, the clerk refused the couple a marriage license because Sawada was the daughter of Japanese immigrants and Nevada had an 1846 statute banning marriage between any white person and "any person of the Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or American Indian, or red race." Bridges and Sawada asked the District Court to order the marriage license be issued. Judge Taylor Wines granted the order and the couple married December 10, 1958. This order prompted the Nevada legislature to repeal the state's anti-miscegenation laws on March 17, 1959.
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Famous quotes related to personal life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To ‘see the light’ too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)