Merl Richerson wasn't exactly worldly when her new neighbors invited her to join them for church one Saturday night in 1947.
She and her family had just moved to the Fourche Dam Pike area of Little Rock, and though her parents weren't churchgoers she had worshipped at a place in Pine Bluff similar to the little country Assembly of God church in College Station that her new friends attended, so she gladly tagged along.
As they walked in, Relton Spann turned in his seat and looked at her.
"He winked at me," she says. "And he said, 'Come up here and sit with me.' I did. I hopped up there and went to sit with him."
At 15, Merl couldn't recall being winked at before. Her parents were fairly strict, and her interactions with the opposite sex up until then were practically nonexistent.
When the service was over, Relton told her he was going to come to her house to see her the next day.
"I said, 'Uh uh. My daddy won't let me have boyfriends,'" she remembers.
Relton wasn't scared of her daddy, though. He showed up despite her protests, just like he said he would. And Merl's father surprised her by not saying anything at all. In fact, he stayed outside for most of Relton's visit. He hadn't told her outright, now that she thinks about it, that she couldn't have boys call on her.
"You just kind of know how your parents feel about things," she says. "I knew he wouldn't like it."
With that hurdle behind them, Merl and Relton began seeing each other regularly at church. And Relton had dinner at the Richerson house every Sunday for the next two years.
"We didn't go to movies or anything like that. The Assembly of God church was real strict and it was mostly church and church events or we would go for a drive and things like that," she says. "We had talked about marriage so one Sunday, when I was 17, I said, 'You need to ask my daddy today if we can get married. If you don't, don't come back,'" she says. "I was ready to get married. I was 17 and I was afraid I was going to be an old maid."
Relton went outside and found Merl's father in the barn and asked him the question. Her father responded with a resounding, "No."
"He raised the roof," she says.
Relton, according to Merl, came back into the house with a big smile on his face.
"He thought he was out of it," she laughs.
But when her mother learned about this turn of events, she marched out to the barn herself. She informed her husband that they had been 17 when they married and, presumably, that what was good enough for them was good enough for their daughter.
"Two weeks later, we got married," Merl says.
Their wedding took place on Jan. 15, 1949, at the end of a regular church service.
"The preacher forgot it and somebody had to hold up their hand to remind him that he was supposed to marry us, so that's the way that turned out," says Merl, who said her vows in a new church dress.
Merl's mother attended, but her father did not.
"There was no honeymoon, no wedding cake or anything like that, but we've been together for 65 years -- and it's been a good 65 years," she says.
The newlyweds stayed with Relton's father -- his mother died a few years before they met -- for a while.
Her father-in-law knew she could barely drive, but he decided she should be able to see her parents whenever she wanted to.
"He had this truck and he told me if I wanted to go see my mama and daddy to just get in the truck and go," she says. "It was just country roads, but I couldn't even turn the truck around. My daddy had to turn the truck around and head it back that way. He was a pretty good old man."
The Spanns soon found a place of their own, and 55 years ago, they built the house they still live in, just a few miles away from where Relton grew up and from where they met all those years ago.
The Spanns raised three children -- Sharon Wells of Springdale and Steve Spann and Terri Crow, both of Little Rock. They also have six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Relton has had various jobs since they married, but for more than 30 years they owned and operated a family grocery store, Spann's Model Market in Little Rock. When they retired from retail, they traveled, seeing parts of Italy, Switzerland, England and more. These days, he tends his large vegetable garden, and she likes to gather the produce and preserve it for the next seasons and she likes to quilt, as well.
"It's been a God-centered marriage. We've been happy," Merl says. "We really have."
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High Profile on 08/31/2014