RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

After he threw rocks, her recall stunned him

— “Nice” definitely wasn’t one of the first words Rhonda Parker would have used to describe Eugene Dunn.

Eugene threw rocks at her and stuck fallen gum tree balls in her long hair while they were waiting for the bus to and from elementary school when she was a first-grader and he was a third-grader in Fountain Lake in 1970.

“He was my brother’s best friend, and he used to come to our house all the time,” she says. “One memory I have, he told me my hair looked stupid and I just cried and cried.”

Gene says it was a matter of common sense.

“She was the little sister so you could be mean to her,” he jokes. “It was in the rule book.”

As they got older, Gene simply ignored her. When he and her brother graduated from high school, her brother joined the Army and Gene stopped being a fixture in their home - for a while. She didn’t see him around town, either, although he stayed in the area.

Rhonda was 17 in March 1981 when Gene called the Parker home to catch up with Rhonda’s brother, home on leave from the Army.

“I said, ‘Well, I’ll just have him call you, Eugene, when he comes in,’” she says. “He said, ‘How’d you know who I was?’ I said, ‘Your voice.’ I knew who he was because I’d talked to him all my life because he would call to talk to Jeff. I have a real thing for voices and his was just one of those deep, sexy voices.”

Gene was shocked that she could recall his voice so easily and asked how old she was.

“She was the little brat kid, from what I remembered,” he says. “When she told me how old she was, I didn’t believe her. I thought she wasn’t that old and I was trying to blow her off because I thought she wasn’t old enough for me to want to date her.”

Still, the conversation turned flirtatious - and lasted for about three hours.

“We just talked about anything and everything. He’s always been a different person - he never went with the in-crowd. And I was into everything that you could be into - I played volleyball, I was in the Beta Club, I was in the FFA, the FHA,” she says.

They decided to get together for dinner and a movie with Rhonda’s brother and her best friend a couple of nights later, followed by riding around until 3 a.m.

“I got in lots of trouble,” she laughs. Her father was waiting up for her when she got home that night, but fortunately he liked Gene so all was soon well.

“The rest was history,” Gene says. “That turned into what I would consider a date, and from that point on she was it for me.”

Gene didn’t exactly propose, Rhonda says.

“He just kind of told me that I would marry him. And then at Christmas he gave me a ring, so I guess you would call that the proposal,” she says of that Christmas Eve they spent with Gene’s family. “He had this great big box and there was a box inside that box, and there was a brick inside there also, and there was a box inside that box all the way down to the little tiny ring box.”

They were married on June 18, 1982, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Hot Springs.

Gene is Catholic, Rhonda a Baptist. Her former high school teacher, a Baptist minister, performed the ceremony.

“He was a math teacher at Fountain Lake for years and he taught all eight of my siblings and there are 35 years between me and my oldest sister,” she says. “That’s the only time he had ever gone into the Catholic church to do anything, so that was kind of neat. He was gracious enough to come into the church and do the wedding ceremony so my family would have a part in it, too.”

The newlyweds spent 10 days in and around Eureka Springs and Branson.

The Dunns later adopted a son, Ben, who now lives in Fountain Lake, and then over 12 years, they fostered 253 others, adopting three more along the way - Jed, Hannah and Winter, who lives in Oklahoma City.

The Dunns have talked almost every day since that three-hour conversation in 1981, the rare exception being when Gene was hunting out of state and couldn’t get a cell phone signal.

And Rhonda, who has battled ovarian cancer in the recent past, calls her once tormentor her biggest hero.

“He’s been so good,” she says. “I really can’t say enough good about him. He’s taken such good care of me - and everything else.”

On our wedding day:

She says: “His grandmother was in the hospital across the street from the church and the entire wedding party walked over there so she could see how everybody was dressed.” He says: “I realized this was real. The whole circumstances were really unique, and we pulled off something to please both families.”

My first impression of my future spouse was:

She says: “That he was mean. When he got older, though, he was sweet. And he’s great big- 6-foot-3, and I’m 5-foot-3.” He says: “She was a brat, a nuisance. Later, it was, ‘Wow. You grew up.’”

My advice for a long happy marriage is:

She says: “Don’t say ‘I quit’ or ‘I want a divorce’ at the first sign of a problem. Try and work it out. And if you talk to each other and keep communication open.” He says: “Compromise on issues. Give and take. Neither one of you can be greedy. It’s not always about me, it’s about us.”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 35 on 03/25/2012

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