Let us pause a moment to praise the car window. After developing them initially to save motorists from the derecho of jetsam stirred up along an unpaved highway, automakers quickly introduced open-able sliding, and then crank windows for comfort.
This, in the wide-angle history of Dwight "Roho" Anderson and Gail Reed, is how they came to share the same orbit.
It was a summer night in 1972, and Gail, who was 17, had just finished her shift at Casa Bonita in the Village Shopping Center on University Avenue in Little Rock and was cruising through the nearby Shoney's parking lot with a friend.
Roho was standing around with another guy, watching as Gail and her friend drove by.
"I had been admiring him because he had long blond hair -- and I mean almost white -- and a full beard and he was really tall," she says. "He sure was cute."
Roho told his friend he was going to meet her, and the second time the girls made the circuit, he surprised everyone by leaping through an open rear window into the back seat of the 1966 Rambler.
"She said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'I just wanted to meet you and you wouldn't stop.' It was a spur of the moment thing."
Truth be told, he knew they couldn't stop.
"It was kind of like a parade. They couldn't just stop or all the cars behind them would have started honking," he says.
The 19-year-old with the odd nickname (it's complicated) introduced himself, and the conversation flowed far more easily than it might if such a thing happened on the front porch of her parents' house or a school hallway.
"He asked if he could go riding with us and, of course, we said yes," she says.
He had graduated from McClellan High School, where Gail was a senior, and they discovered they had some mutual friends. At the end of the night, they decided to meet in the same place the next night. Before long they were dating regularly.
Gail's very proper mother was not impressed with him the first time they met. He had folded his 6-foot-4 frame and size 13 bare feet into his tiny MG Midget for the drive over.
"I couldn't drive the car with shoes on because my foot would hit the clutch and the brake pedal at the same time, so I had to drive it barefooted. I had long hair and a long beard and I was kind of a hippie back then. But her mother and I ended up being the best of friends."
Cruising was a staple activity for the couple. He also raced cars at the I-30 Speedway, in the same 6-cylinder hobby class as a teenaged Mark Martin was racing in during the early '70s.
When Gail graduated from high school, Roho put the brakes on their romance.
"I thought she was too young and we were getting too serious too fast," he says. "I was too young, too, because there were some things I wanted to do. I thought she needed to take some time and not get so serious right out of high school, so I broke up with her," he says.
She was hurt but understood his point.
"In retrospect, I'm glad that he did give me that time, and I did date some other people that summer," she says, "But I still thought that he was 'the one.'"
They got back together by summer's end, and when he bought a house and enlisted Gail's help in searching for used furniture to fill it up, her mother wondered if they had plans they hadn't shared with her.
"I had not proposed," says Roho, "but after we got back together I guess we just knew we were going to get married someday."
He did propose eventually, and she gave him free rein to pick the wedding date.
"I was born on Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year, so I said I would like to get married on the longest day, June 21," he says.
They exchanged vows on June 21, 1974, at First Lutheran Church in Little Rock.
Roho works in vehicle maintenance at Arkansas State Police headquarters. Gail is a bookkeeper for a real estate developer. Their only child, Leslie, died two years ago at age 21 after a long battle with leukemia.
"We've been in it for so many good times and for some really bad times, too," says Gail. "We feel fortunate in a lot of ways."
Roho says the bad times have made them closer.
"We've traveled to Europe together three or four times, and we've been to every state together on our motorcycle," he says. "You have to have fun together. To be successful in marriage, you have to keep living and keep having fun together. You have to enjoy life. I feel like we do."
If you have an interesting how-we-met story or know someone who does, please call (501) 378-3496 or email
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High Profile on 06/15/2014