LITTLE ROCK — For Genyth Wells and Ed Kubitz, a forbidden time in a forbidden place turned out to be the right time and the right place.
Genyth was 16, out with three girlfriends from her church in 1952.
"I had slipped off," she explains. She can't remember where she told her parents she was going that night, but it wasn't the USO dance in downtown Memphis where she ended up. "I just didn't quite tell them the truth. I was raised in a very strict Baptist home, and I'm a very strict Baptist now."
To get into the dance, Genyth provided her real name, but she made up an address because she was afraid someone might call her mom and dad.
Once inside, "I was just standing there," she says. "I was scared to death, my eyes were real big, you know, and he came over and asked me to dance."
"He" was Ed, a Navy man. He thought she was attractive, and he liked her cute figure.
"I was just a typical young guy wanting to dance with a young lady," he says.
They danced again and again and as the night came to an end, Ed asked if he could take Genyth home.
"I said, 'Noooo,'" she remembers. But as she talked with her girlfriends, she realized she really liked him and that she wanted him to give her a ride. She found him and said she thought it would be fine if he drove her to her girlfriend's house, as long as her girlfriends could come along, too.
The girls directed Ed to what he thought was Genyth's friend's house, and he had no idea he was being misled; the girlfriend's house was at least four or five blocks away from where he dropped them off.
"We walked home and giggled all the way," she says.
Ed drove away with no expectation of seeing Genyth in the future.
"It was like, 'Well, we'll see ya.' That was their attitude. AndI figured, well, that was the end of that," he says. "And then I got a phone call at the base and it was a girlfriend of hers and she started telling me, Genyth thinks you're mad at her. And I said, well, no, I'm not mad at her. I just figured she didn't want to have anything to do with me. When we parted ways, it was cordial but it was just goodbye and that was it."
He called Genyth, and that was the beginning of a four-year courtship.
Genyth eventually admitted to Ed, who was 20, that she had told him she was older than she was - at 16, she looked at least 18 - and they spent as much time together as they could.
When he was sent to the naval base in Pensacola, Fla., three years after they met, he found his way back to Memphis almost every weekend to see her.
He hitchhiked a couple of times, leaving Memphis at noon on Sunday and arriving in Pensacola just in time for reveille the next morning.
"Hitchhiking wasn't much fun," he says with a laugh.
After a couple of trips, Gen - yth's dad offered him a '52 Plymouth for the commute, and that made things much easier.
One night when Ed was in Memphis he and Genyth decided to get married.
"He just proposed to me at my mother and daddy's," she says.
Ed says it wasn't so much a formal proposal as it was a foregone conclusion.
"We did love one another very much, and we knew we were going to get married," he says. "But it wasn't anything dramatic - I'm not a dramatic kind of guy."
They exchanged vows at a big wedding on Sept. 13, 1958.
Almost immediately, they moved to Denver, where they moved in with Ed's parents so he could start classes at the University of Denver, where he majored in electrical engineering.
Ed and Genyth stayed in Denver for only a year, however, with Genyth boarding a plane to return home to Memphis when she was eight months pregnantwith their daughter. Ed followed soon after with all their belongings, and he got a job with IBM in Memphis.
In 1967, IBM transferred the Kubitzes to Little Rock, which they have called home ever since.
The Kubitzes have two children - Genyth Thomas of Tucson, Ariz., and Ed Kubitz of Little Rock. "We didn't really have a lot of imagination when we were naming our kids," Ed says. They also have two grandchildren, Michael Benjamin Thomas and Kaylee Dawn Kubitz.
"And we have a little Chihuahua, Tootsie, that I call my little girl," says Genyth.
Although Genyth's going to the USO dance behind her parents' back was out of character for her, and she did suffer angst about it just after she arrived, it's not something she regrets doing.
"That's where I met my husband," she says with a laugh. "We've been happily ever after since then." If you have an interesting how-we-met story or know someone who does,please call (501) 378-3496 or e-mail: cjenkins@arkansasonline.com
High Profile, Pages 49 on 10/28/2007