Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, Rediscovered.

Want to know the most romantic day in U.S. history? It wasn't on Valentine's Day. Let me tell you about August 26,

1965. Young men were proposing all over the country. That's because on August 26th,

and otherwise unromantic Thursday, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an executive order

changing draft rules for the Vietnam War. One second after midnight, married men would no

longer be exempt from the draft. Those second after midnight, married men would no longer be exempt from the draft. Those married

before midnight would be. In Las Vegas, you can imagine what happened next. It was a total

bridal wave. James Brennan, a Justice of the Peace in Las Vegas, had never seen anything like it.

He left his office to perform a wedding at the Dunes Hotel, and when he got back,

he was shocked to find more than 50 couples waiting for him at the Clark County Courthouse.

News photos show the small courthouse jammed with young adults,

the grooms and their skinny ties all seemingly in the

draftable age bracket of 19 to 26. Some were dressed for matrimony, others in dungarees.

One woman had a veil that she then loaned to five other brides. Brendan and his colleagues

married 171 couples that day, according to news reports from back then.

Over 100 of those weddings took place between 10 p.m. and midnight.

The normal pace for a summer Thursday would have been 10 to 12 weddings at the most.

The draft age men of Nevada were lucky.

It's quite easy, as everyone knows, to get married there in a pinch.

Not so easy in other places like the East Coast,

where midnight came much quicker and where many states had so-called

cooling off periods before getting a marriage license to get hitched.

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