posted 08-23-2015 11:24 PM               

Only a few online searchable sources state the answer was twice, and only two are detailed about who may have been the first. "One Small Step: The Apollo Missions, the Astronauts, the Aftermath" by Tim Furness (1989) states:

He married Mary Etta Wehling, a devout Roman Catholic, who divorced him shortly after, the result of religious conflicts...

In December 1952 he married Mary Etta Wehling, a young woman that he had met in Texas, but the marriage ended in divorce in the summer of 1954.

SpaceFacts.de lists Mary Etta Wehling as Irwin's first wife and Mary Ellen Monroe as his second. The Scribner Encyclopedia describes:

After a training flight to California, Irwin met Mary Ellen Monroe in San Jose, and the two were married on 4 September 1959.

posted 08-24-2015 01:27 AM               

There is a sad chapter in Jim Irwin's military life that does not appear in any NASA biography: he was briefly married to and then divorced from his first wife, Mary Etta Wehling, the daughter of an officer at Reese AFB in Lubbock, Texas. By his own admission they were both young and immature, but ironically it was religious differences (his family was Protestant, hers Catholic) that finally drove them apart - perhaps in part a legacy of his ancestry.