RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

Inert Model A in yard took couple a long way

Dorothy Wortman and Harlan Moring were two of only nine students in their third-grade class at McClung School in Jefferson County, but they weren't well-acquainted by the time Dorothy moved away. "I was too shy to talk to the teacher, let alone to him," Dorothy says, referring to Harlan.

The school, divided into two rooms, accommodated eight grades but had no running water and was heated by a wood-burning stove and lighted with coal oil lamps.

The first time I saw my future spouse:

She says: “I was just in the third grade. I didn’t pay much attention.”

He says: “I noticed she had a special dress on then and, boy, she looked good.”

My advice for a long happy marriage is:

She says: “That it’s give and take. You just have to hang in there.”

He says: “When she tells you to do something you say, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and, ‘No ma’am.’ I helped my mother after all my sisters left, hanging clothes out on the line, scrubbing wood floors until they looked real shiny.”

My biggest memory for my wedding day is:

She says: “I got to wear my dress that my mother had made. I still have it. It’s in the cedar chest. It was white, and it had a tiered skirt, and then it had a blue sash belt, and up around the square neck there was blue ribbon woven into the lace.”

He says: “That was the most important day I ever had, was my wedding day.”

Harlan was as rowdy as Dorothy was bashful back then, but he insists she did not escape his attention.

"You didn't claim me as a girlfriend then because you had another one," Dorothy says, facing him today.

A couple of years after she'd left she returned and re-enrolled at McClung. Now in fifth grade, she was not so reserved. At least not with Harlan.

They talked every recess, and before long, Harlan was walking a mile and a half out of his way after school so he could hold her hand and escort her home.

"I wasn't there all the time because I had to work in the field a whole lot," he says.

Dorothy, too, had to miss school often to care for her mother through a lengthy illness.

But Harlan wasn't surprised when Dorothy invited him to her house, because by then they had gotten close.

"We didn't do a whole lot of dating because he had to work in the fields and I had to take care of my mother," she says.

It became a regular thing for them to climb into a discarded Model A up on blocks next to the Wortman home and just chat for hours.

"There was a window [facing us in the car] and every once in a while I would notice that my mother was watching us out that window," Dorothy says. "We did a whole lot of courting, I guess you would call it, sitting in that car."

She was about 15, she says, when she claimed him as her boyfriend.

Sometime during the early months of their year-long courtship, Dorothy caught a ride into England, the nearest town, with a neighbor who had a truck. That woman not only gave her a ride. She helped her pick out some pretty white fabric Dorothy bought with money she earned picking corn and cotton.

"I don't know if my mother knew the material was for a wedding dress or not," she says.

She wasn't engaged as yet -- "I thought I was," she says -- but she was of the mindset that it certainly wouldn't hurt to be prepared. "If you had a chance to go you went and if you had money you bought it, regardless of what time it got made," Dorothy says.

When the time came, Harlan went to the honky tonk where he and Dorothy sometimes danced to find her father -- "He would stop fights there sometimes," she says -- and ask for her hand in marriage.

Her father was fine with the idea of their nuptials, but the next step, getting a marriage license, proved to be a bigger challenge. Harlan was 17 and Dorothy was 16, meaning both needed permission from their parents to wed. Harlan didn't know that when he popped into the courthouse in Lonoke with his brother-in-law.

He returned with his father and father-in-law-to-be on June 19, 1944, to secure the paperwork. "It was getting to be about 8 o'clock when we got over to the preacher's house. I knew him real well," Harlan says. "We got him out of the bed, and he married us."

The newlyweds lived with Harlan's family for a couple of months before moving into their own home just down the dirt lane.

In 1951 the Morings moved to North Little Rock, where Harlan got a job with Jackson Cookie Co. Dorothy worked for Adkins-Phelps Seed Co., Meyer's Bakery and United States Time Corp. (which became Timex Corp.). When they retired, they moved to Kingsland to be near their daughter, Mary Ann Franklin. Their other daughter, Carol Oglesby, lives in Edmond, Okla.

The Morings have five grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

"He is really good to me. He helps me clean the house, he does the vacuuming and the mopping and he helps me cook. Whatever I do, he's there helping," she says. "It's been a long road but we have made it. We have had ups and downs, but we are still here."

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 on 07/20/2014

Upcoming Events