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Regina Cline met her future husband, Edward Francis O’Connor, Jr., at the wedding of her youngest brother, Herbert Aloysius Cline, to O’Connor’s younger sister Anne Golden O’Connor. The simple ceremony at the Sacred Heart Chapel of the cathedral in Savannah, on July 18, 1922, was characterized in a newspaper announcement as an “interesting, quiet wedding . . . neither bride nor bridegroom having an attendant.” As Regina Cline was twenty-six years old at the time, some of the older women in her family might have felt — like Lucynell Crater for her daughter in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — “ravenous” for a suitor. Apparently the pretty young woman with the heart-shaped face had once been disappointed in love when a Protestant family living in Pennsylvania convinced their son, who was working in Milledgeville, not to marry her on religious grounds.
    Ed O’Connor, also twenty-six, and also on the rebound from an unhappy love affair, made a likely candidate. With a stage actor’s good looks, direct pale blue eyes, and the flair of a mustache, he cut quite a figure in Irish circles about town. As his sister recalled, he loved to “put on his white linen suit, tilt his straw boater over his eye, and go out to Tybee Island dancing of a summer evening.” The oldest of eight children, he was educated at Benedictine College, a military prep school in Savannah, and attended Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmetsburg, Maryland, after failing to secure a spot at Annapolis because of a low math score — a lack of aptitude for numbers inherited by his daughter. Her friend Robert Fitzgerald recalled a photograph of him as “a robust, amused young man. . . . sitting like the hub of a wheel with his five gay younger brothers beside and behind him.”
    After college, Ed O’Connor served between May 1916 and August 1917 in the Georgia National Guard taking part in the “Mexican Expedition” led by General John J. Pershing to patrol the border of New Mexico against incursions by the rebel general of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa, often vilified in the press as a bandit and horse thief. The “Expedition” included punitive invasions into Mexican territory. During World War I, O’Connor was deployed overseas, between April 1918 and May 1919, in the 325th Infantry of the 82nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force, the “All Americans” out of Camp Gordon, Georgia, with their famed “AA” shoulder patches. For helping rout the German Imperial Army from France, he was awarded, at the rank of second lieutenant, a World War I Victory Medal and Victory Button.
    A nagging downside for Regina Cline, in choosing a husband, was Ed O’Connor’s background — his family never achieved the social stature of the Clines of Milledgeville, or the Flannerys of Savannah, though they led comfortable middle-class lives. His grandfather Patrick O’Connor, a wheelwright, emigrated from Ireland with his brother Daniel in 1851, and established a livery stable on Broughton Street. His father, Edward Francis O’Connor, Sr., was a wholesale distributor of candies and tobacco; he was a prominent enough businessman, though, to have been president of the People’s Bank, and a director of the Hibernia Bank. When Regina Cline met him, her future husband was living with his parents at 115 East Gwinnett Street, working as a salesman in his father’s company, and hoping to make a start in the real estate business.
    Their courtship was quick. Less than three months after they met, one of Regina Cline’s older brothers, Dr. Bernard Cline, placed an engagement announcement in the
Savannah Morning News,
promising, “The wedding will take place at an early date.” Just a week later, on Saturday, October 14, 1922, the couple was married at Sacred Heart Church, in Milledgeville, by the Reverend T. J. Morrow. The newlyweds then moved into a small set of rooms that the young husband could afford in the recently built Graham