LITTLE ROCK — Paula Trible and her friends were at the Village Supper Club in Spartanburg, S.C., in August 1959 to watch bachelors as they looked for new girls in town.
“It was just fun,” says Paula. “And of course we were giggling and having a good time.”
Jim Moseley admits he and his buddies were, indeed, wondering if there might be anyone new. But he says he immediately zeroed in on Paula, who had been there all along.
“I saw this person who had on a trench coat, and she kind of caught my eye,” he says.
Paula was a senior at Converse College in Spartanburg; Jim, a native of St. Augustine, Fla., had finished his undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry at Emory University in Atlanta in 1957 and then joined the management training program with Sears in Spartanburg.
The trench coat, Paula explains, was to cover her pants.
“Back then, if you left the campus, you were to wear a dress,” she explains.
She was at school before the start of fall classes, preparing things for the other students.
“Naturally we worked in pants,” she says, “but to go off campus, we had to roll them up and put on our trench coats so nobody could see them.”
Paula had no qualms about dancing with Jim when he asked, because she knew he had dated an acquaintance from Converse.
Jim says he probably waited a few days to call her. Their first date was to a movie.
A few weeks later, he invited her to go with him to pick up his fraternity’s houseboat at a nearby lake. He forgot that the window on the right side of the truck he was driving often got stuck - and onthis trip it got stuck while it was rolled down.
They made the hour-long drive in the rain with the passenger-side window open, which exposed Paula to the rain and cold wind all the way home.
“I think I caught pneumonia from it,” she says with a laugh. “I caught a cold and could not get rid of it.”
Over the Christmas break, Jim told Paula that he wanted to drive from his sister’s house in Raleigh, N.C., to her family’s home in West Point, Va., to see her.
“She said, ‘Well, I have a date tonight.’ She encouraged me to come, but she made it clear that she had a date,” Jim says.
When Jim arrived at Paula’s house, her mother directed him down the street to the country club where the Christmas dance was going on. Paula’s date was someone she had known for most of her life, and he knew all about Jim.
“If I remember correctly it was kind of an awkward walk into the dance floor,” he says. “But he was very graceful and pleasant. The bottom line is, I took her home.”
As Paula got ready for graduation that spring, Jim decided to pop the question.
“Because I knew that once summertime came and shegot away, off doing things, starting her career, traveling - she might slip through my fingers,” he says.
He proposed to Paula in the kitchen of his efficiency apartment.
Before meeting Jim, Paula had planned to teach English to students abroad - and to see some of the world in the process.
“But the more I was around Jim and what we were developing as a relationship, the ‘me’ was moving more out of my brain,” she says. “There’s the head and there’s the heart, and the heart knew that’s what I wanted, but the head was saying, ‘But Paula, you want to do something.’ They began mingling together and when they came together itwasn’t me, it was ‘we.’”
Paula and Jim wed on Oct. 8, 1960, in a little church in West Point.
Her father had joked to Jim that he would be taking Paula fishing the night of their wedding, meaning that she wouldn’t actually be atthe ceremony.
Paula didn’t go fishing, but she did forget the family prayer book that she was planning to carry during the wedding, and her father ran the four blocks back to their house to get it.
“And while they were going back to get the prayer book, there were five wedding marches played and my father was up there with me as I looked out over that crowd and saw all my family and friends and fraternity brothers looking at me,” says Jim, who didn’t know the reason for the delay until later.
The Moseleys moved 10 times before settling in Little Rock in 1977, each time for a promotion and a new position for Jim with Sears. He retired from the company in 1993.
They have four grown children - Trible Moseley of Maumelle, Robert Moseley of Brentwood, Tenn., Garrett Moseley and Julie Moseley, both of Charlotte, N.C. - and four grandchildren.
And although Paula thought she was giving upa life of seeing the world to marry Jim, she has been able to see it with him.
“We love to travel, and we have done it together,” she says.
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
He says: “It’s important to be consistent, and with that you have to be predictable. And it’s compromise and it’s consideration and it’s cooperation and it’s courage. It takes courage to make the tough decisions.” She says: “It’s teamwork. I think you must learn to respect one another’s ideas. Even if I don’t agree with him, and he doesn’t agree with me, we still respect our individual ideas on the subject.”
Before we exchanged our wedding vows, I was thinking:
He says: “I had a high degree of confidence she was going to show up, but I did not know why the delay.” She says: “When I finally got up there, I was hoping I could remember the wedding vows. We memorized them, and I thought, ‘Will I remember to say these things ?’”If you have an interesting how-wemet story or know someone who does, please call (501) 378-3496 or e-mail:
High Profile, Pages 41 on 09/26/2010