In the summer of 1963, Tom McDermott was with a friend at Snappy’s, the place to see and be seen in Little Rock, when he spotted Helen Pritchard cruising around with her best friend.
“I waved at her, and I got totally ignored,” Tom says.
“I didn’t know him!” Helen says.
A few nights later, he saw this slight girl with the bouffant “air hairdo” again, and he got his friend, who had been dating her friend, to properly introduce them.
Helen was pleased to make his acquaintance.
“He had big brown dark eyes and dark hair with a crew cut,” she says. “He was clean-shaven, just a good-looking, all-American guy.”
He asked her for a date, and when the time came, he and two other couples picked her up.
“The guys didn’t have enough money to go anywhere, except to pool their money and buy some gas so we could cruise,” Helen says.
They ended up at the Old Mill in North Little Rock, where Helen and Tom strolled and talked.
That would be the only time they would talk before Tom left for Army basic training in Fort Polk, La., two days later.
“When he took me home after the first date he asked if he could call me the next day because he was going out with the guys and I said, ‘Yes, please call me,’” she says. “When I got home from work that night I told my mother that I was expecting his call. She sent me to the store and I missed it. When I got home, I started crying. My mother said, ‘You only went out with him one time. Why are you so upset?’ I said, ‘Because I really wanted to talk to him because he is going out of state.’”
He considered trying calling her again later, but his night out went until 2 or 3 a.m., and he boarded a bus at 6 a.m. Phone time was scarce in basic training, Tom explains, with only one pay phone shared by a multitude of men.
So they wrote letters - lots of them.
Tom returned to Little Rock for 10 days around Christmas.
“By then our letters had started getting serious,” Helen says. “He had indicated that he wanted me to marry him. He hadn’t asked me, but we were going to talk about it when he got home. He asked me to marry him when he came back for Christmas. I told him he needed to ask me again later because we didn’t know each other very well, because we needed to wait until he came home to decide for sure, before we even told anybody we were going to get married.”
They continued writing, and on Feb. 3, 1964, Tom came home again.
“I was working at the Bank of Arkansas on Asher [Avenue] and he was sitting in the living room when I got home,” she recalls. “I wasn’t expecting him then. He had his uniform on and he looked so handsome. He’s a handsome man, anyway.”
Tom proposed again, and this time she accepted. They bought rings in March.
Both were 20 when they married on April 10, 1964, at Rosedale Baptist Church in Little Rock, surrounded by friends and family, many of them surprised by the love that blossomed between Tom and Helen via the U.S. Postal Service.
“He wasn’t here,” she says. “They didn’t see us together.”
Their long-distance courtship was a blessing in many ways.
“We didn’t have any distractions from friends trying to persuade us to date somebody else or to go some other direction,” she says. “We could just focus on getting to know each other.”
Their first apartment was three rooms over a garage on Marshall Street, “and we thought we were on top of the world at that time,” Helen says.
They have two sons: Tommy of Pacifica, Calif., and Shawn of Paducah, Ky. They have two grandchildren.
Tom and Helen made their home, for most of their marriage, in Sherwood, and moved to Paducah five years ago, following Tom’s retirement from a GM dealership and Helen’s retirement from a hematology/ oncology clinic.
Tom has forgiven Helen for not returning his wave all those years ago, although he has not forgotten.
“I’ve never lived that down,” she says.
She did have plenty to say after they met, though.
“She more than made up for it,” he concedes. “Neither of us believed in love at first sight at all, but it certainly was a whirlwind deal.”
They have held on to the letters that set their future in motion.
On our wedding day: She says: “I spent the whole day preparing for the wedding. It was, really, the entire day that was wonderful.” He says: “I remember walking out and seeing all the people and thinking, ‘My goodness, where did all these people come from?’ And I remember seeing her walking down the aisle.”
The first time I saw my future spouse: She says: “I was taken aback because he was such an attractive man. I liked him from the first time I saw him.” He says: “I thought she was really attractive, and I really wanted to meet her and she just totally ignored me.”
I knew he or she was the one for me: She says: “After our first date. I just felt like I needed to get to know him better.” He says: “Because our letters were very honest and sincere. There was no pretense to them. We bared our souls to each other and really got to know one another.”
My advice for a long happy marriage: She says: “You’ve got to love the person, and you have to have a commitment. A commitment will take you through the good and the bad because everyone is going to have bumpy times in their marriage. It’s also important to have a God-centered home.” He says: “We had this overall conversation about how the first time we had a big argument, neither one of us was going to go running home to mom and dad.”
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High Profile, Pages 43 on 04/13/2014