Vivian Fulbright didn’t go to the dance at the USO in Newport looking for Herb Lehman, and it’s a good thing, because he wasn’t there, twice.
Vivian, who grew up in Batesville, went to Newport with her aunt and a girlfriend to watch a ballgame.
“Batesville and Newport were rivals,” explains Vivian, who was living in Little Rock at the time.
They didn’t know there was a USO in Newport, but when they discovered it, they decided to go to a dance there.
Herb Lehman, an Elgin, Ill., native stationed at the Marine Corps Auxiliary Air Field in Newport, spotted Vivian soon after she arrived that evening, but she was just having a good time and paid him no attention.
“I danced with everybody,” she says.
After the dance she and her aunt and friend went with a bunch of people they met at the dance to the only place in Newport they could get a sandwich in the mid-1940s. That’s where Herb asked one of the girls for Vivian’s address.
“He wrote to me and he was wanting to come and see me. I didn’t know him - I didn’t remember him - so I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just meet me at the USO?’ I didn’t wait for him there - I usually went to the USO anyway because they had the dances. He didn’t show up,” she says.
Not long after that, she got another letter, asking her to meet him again. This time, too, he stood her up.
“I wrote him and told him, ‘Never mind. I don’t depend on you for dates.’”
Since she didn’t remember who he was, she didn’t feel a great loss. But she was annoyed.
Another night she was at the USO and, wouldn’t you know it, there was Lehman. He even “cut in, but I didn’t remember him and he said, ‘You don’t know who I am.’ I said no. He said, ‘I’m Herb from Newport.’ I said, ‘You sit me down.’ I didn’t even want to dance with him. But he wouldn’t sit me down, and … kept on dancing with me.”
Herb can’t recall what kept him from being present when he said he would, but he thinks it might have had something to do with his place on the military basketball team and a victory that took him to the state tournament played in Little Rock.
“I don’t remember all of that. I just remember that I fell in love with her when I saw her,” he says.
His persistence resulted in their dating regularly until he got notice that he would be shipped overseas for a year. So he began talking marriage.
“I said, no, I would not get married. I was too young. I had seen too many women who were married that went to the dances when they should have been at home,” she says.
Vivian continued going to the dances while he was gone, and when Herb returned home to Elgin he started making plans to visit her in Little Rock.
“I was just heading down to Arkansas to see her,” Herb says. “I had no intention of getting married. But it just turned out that I proposed to her anyway.”
It happened while they swam at Willow Springs Water Park.
“I really didn’t want him to get away,” she says. “We realized we did not want to be apart. He would have gone home to Illinois and I would have still been down here. That’s the reason we decided that regardless of whether he had a job, that’s what we were going to do, that this was the time.”
Vivian was 19 and Herb was 21 on Aug. 17, 1946, when they set out to find a Baptist preacher in Benton who would marry them. They didn’t yet have a marriage license, so the preacher directed them to a young woman who would have the appropriate paperwork.
“She was out where all the kids hung out at a hamburger place, so we went home with her and she filled it out and we went back to the preacher and his wife,” Vivian says.
Vivian’s friend accompanied them on their honeymoon in Jonesboro for a few days before they headed to Illinois.
“It was at night, and I got sleepy. So she sat up in the front seat with Herb until we reached Jonesboro,” Vivian recalls.
The Lehmans moved back and forth from Elgin to Little Rock a few times during the early years of their marriage, but settled in Arkansas for good in 1970.
They raised two children - Kathy Griffis of Little Rock and Tim Lehman, who died in 2004. They have two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
The third time turned out to be the charm for Herb and Vivian, and they’re glad it did.
“We’re just playing bridge, going to church and doing our thing now,” Vivian says. “That’s our story.”The first time I saw my future spouse: She says: “I didn’t notice him. There were so many boys that I didn’t know him from Adam.” He says: “I liked the looks of her. I thought she was a pretty girl and I was interested.” My advice for a long happy marriage is:She says: “You have your ups and downs but you get over it.” He says: “People have got to contain themselves.
When you’ve got your way and she’s got her way and yet you’re living together, there are some remarks along the way, but if you truly love each other and you have a Christian attitude, I think you can always work it out.”If you have an interesting how-we-met story or know someone who does, please call (501) 378-3496 or email:
High Profile, Pages 37 on 04/20/2014