My Mother Married Wilbur Stump is a video family album compiled by Skip Sweeney, a founder of San Francisco’s Video Free America, an alternative media facility.

Mr. Sweeney seems to have spent the greater part of his life recording the equivalent of home movies starring his parents and assorted siblings. One result is ”My Father Sold Studebakers,” covering the life and death of his car-salesman dad. It will be repeated on public television this June as a Father’s Day special. In 1972, a year after his father died, Mr. Sweeney’s rather proper mother, Bernardine, startled her family by suddenly eloping with Wilbur Stump, a piano-bar performer who had been through, among other things, seven divorces and four hospitalizations for alcoholism.

Completed last year, the film begins as a straightforward interview with Mrs. Stump. Wilbur Stump, 15 years her senior, died in 1982. They had had 10 happy years of marriage. Now, Mrs. Stump recalls how she met ”this old geezer” performing at the local bar near the family’s summer-vacation home. Mr. Stump was quite bald and missing two front teeth, she says, but was wearing a kind of dapper outfit. ”Can you play ‘You’re Blase’?” she asked. ”Lady, you’ve got class,” responded Mr. Stump. She later found out that it was one of his standard lines with customers. ”It was unthinkable that I’d fall in love with him,” she says, ”but I did.”

As Mrs. Stump tells her story, several of her children – including Skip Sweeney, who remains off camera -ask her questions and add their own details. There were problems. Mrs. Stump is a practicing Roman Catholic and her marriage to a divorced man was not taken lightly. But, after more than two years of petitioning Rome, she managed to get Mr. Stump’s former marriages officially annulled. More complicated, the couple had to contend with what they perceived as the disapproving attitudes of some of her children. Even now, she is compelled to observe that ”Wilbur was a lot smarter than you guys thought.”

What finally emerges is not just the unusual story of Bernardine and Wilbur Stump but the portrait of an entire family, crammed with tensions and laughs, estrangements and reconciliations. As one daughter laughingly observes, ”The guilt trips never end.” But neither does the love that clearly binds together all of these very different individuals. Commenting on the success of Mrs. Stump’s marriage, a friend explains that ”your mother let Wilbur Stump be Wilbur Stump.” Meanwhile, on a record album, Mr. Stump can be heard singing: ”And I’ll follow where she takes me/Though it leads to God-knows-where/As long as she loves me/What the hell do I care.” Mr. Sweeney has skillfully captured the special humor and poignancy of our ordinary lives.

By JOHN J. O’CONNOR
The New York Times
Sunday Arts Section
Published: May 9, 1986