LITTLE ROCK — It was perfect. They met at a YWCA dance neither one had especially wanted to attend.
In the winter of 1962, Paul Sheffield was stationed at the Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville. He was only at the dance that night because his friend asked him to go. “I don’t know why he wanted to go, but I was just tagging along,” says Paul, who did not like to dance.
Patty Jean Dugger didn’t like dancing either, but she was with a bunch of her girlfriends, and “I just went because it was always interesting to meet new people, and I wasn’t dating anyone specific,” she says.
Paul’s friend knew one of Pat’s friends, and as they stood around talking, he introduced Paul to Pat. A few days later, Paul called Pat for a date. She thought he was a nice guy so she agreed to go. Their first date was a double with Paul’s friend and his girlfriend, to a drive-in for some coffee. “It was one of those places where they put the tray on your window, and it was pretty cold,” Paul says. “She took her coffee and swigged it down in about two swallows and I let mine sit out there on the tray in the cold for three or four more minutes and then I took a drink of it and it burned me all the way to my stomach.”
He set his cup back outside in the cold to cool some more.
“I took a drink of my really hot coffee and so he thought it was just fine to drink his,” she says.
Not long after that, Paul, who used to be a smoker, put a cigarette in his mouth and lit the filter end by mistake.
“I wouldn’t even have thought about him being nervous since we were on a double-date with someone he knew, but I guess he was a little bit flustered,” says Pat of Paul’s flub. “When he lit the filter it flamed up.” Fortunately, no eyebrows were singed.
For her part, Pat overlooked the appalling appearance of Paul’s car, a copper-colored Plymouth with a botched repainting job. “I had to have a deep respect for the kind of person he was to be seen in that car,” she says.
So they didn’t dance. So what. They cooked up a romance around the slower things - movies and picnics and playing cards with friends. That’s how Pat went from seeing him as just a nice guy she was dating casually to the guy she could see herself with long into the future.
Paul proposed to her one afternoon when they stopped at Boyle Park after driving around for a while. “We werevery poor so we didn’t do engagement rings,” she says. “We just did wedding rings. I always said, ‘Oh, I don’t like diamonds. They’re so pretentious.’
“I think it was on our 20th anniversary that he just came home with one for me [and] I decided I liked diamonds really well.”
They were married March 2, 1963, at Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, and they honeymooned in Hot Springs. Pat was eight months pregnant with their first child when they got orders from the Air Force to go to Maine.
“That was a long way to travel for someone who was eight months pregnant,” she says. “So we swapped [ orders] with another guy and we went to Oklahoma, and that’s where our son was born.”
Their son, David, now lives in Little Rock.
When Paul got out of the Air Force, they moved to his hometown of Pine Bluff. Their daughter, Robyn Edwards, was born there. She now lives in Maumelle, with her husband, Patrick, and their two sons.
Paul got a job with the railroad, and when their children went off to college, Pat went to college, too. She got a degree in art and went to work teaching in Star City and later in the Dollarway School District.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s been” 50 years, Paul says.
“We’ve had a really great marriage,” Pat says. “We’ve had a good life here.”The first time my future spouse met my family: She says: “I was nervous because my dad had not been very nice to my sisters’ boyfriends when he first met them. I waited until we were almost married but they loved him instantly. There was just something about his personality, and I think he just went out there and started mowing their yard.” He says: “I knew they would like her so I wasn’t worried about it.” On our wedding day: She says: “I had planned and paid for everything but on the way to the church it dawned on me that I hadn’t arranged for anyone to pick up our wedding cake and take it to the apartment for the reception.” He says: “I was a nervous wreck.”If you have an interesting howwe-met story or know someone who does, please call (501) 378-3496 or e-mail: cjenkins@arkansasonline.com
High Profile, Pages 39 on 02/24/2013