Margie Sharpe watched Gene France take his swings at the plate many times before she finally brought him home. Margie's best friend, Sally, developed a major league crush on Gene when they were kids, and she asked Margie to go with her to Gene's baseball games.
"We would sit in the bleachers of the Little League baseball game and plan strategies as to how Sally could get Gene to notice her," says Margie, who was 12 when this story begins. Sally, they decided, would get his attention by being calm and reserved, and by knowing the game.
In the midst of all of this strategizing, Margie developed a sizable crush of her own on Gene. Her loyalty was to her best friend, though, and she made no move to foul Sally and Gene's budding romance.
Sally and Gene were together and apart and together again over the next few years, and every time their rocky relationship went on hiatus Gene showed a marked interest in Margie.
"Sally did not like that and she and Gene would get back together," Margie says.
After one break-up, Gene and Margie went on a school trip to a statewide Latin convention in Little Rock together, sitting together on the bus ride there and back. That evening they went on an actual car date, their first one together. Gene was not yet 16 and couldn't drive, but they were friends with a slightly older couple who drove them around town.
"I thought, 'Oh, boy, he really likes me,'" Margie recalls. "We had a wonderful date. But Monday morning when I got to school, Sally and Gene were back together, and I was once again out of the picture and just devastated. So that was pretty hard, but I thought, you know, if it's really meant to be it'll turn out and I'll get to date Gene steady one of these days."
The end came for Sally and Gene at the end of their sophomore year in high school. Sally and Margie were sitting on Margie's bed one late spring evening, gossiping about friends and acquaintances, when Sally confided in Margie about two-timing Gene with a high school senior. The windows were open and just outside it they heard a scuffle and plenty of giggling. A friend of Gene's and the boy who lived next to Margie had been eavesdropping and they wasted no time relaying what they had heard to Gene, who tracked Margie down at the swimming pool the next day and demanded that she confirm the news.
Gene declared his relationship to Sally over, but Margie continued hiding her feelings for him.
It was long distance for Gene to call Forrest City from his home outside of town, so he would ride into town with his brothers when they gathered at the home of the Sharpes, who were sponsors of their high school fraternity, and he would call his girlfriends from there.
He knew which girls to call because he would ply Margie for the names of girls who didn't have a date. Margie exercised remarkable restraint, never answering, "Me. I don't have a date."
Margie and Gene became best friends over the next year, spending time together and even sharing a locker at school. She wrote his speeches and created posters for his campaign for student body president that year.
"He ended up winning."
Some time around the end of the year, it dawned on Gene that while Margie was his best friend, she had become much more.
"I realized I was closest to her and that she and I had done so much together and that she had always been there for me," he says. "I finally realized this was the person God put me to be with."
They dated through the rest of high school and through four years of college.
They were on their way to midnight Mass in Forrest City on Christmas Eve 1971 when Gene pulled over on the interstate and, as cars and 18-wheelers whizzed by outside, gave Margie an engagement ring.
"I was going to do it after Mass when I dropped her off at home but I couldn't wait, I was so excited," says Gene, who had just gotten the ring that day. "It was too hot for me to hold onto."
They exchanged their vows on June 24, 1972.
Gene started medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock the following fall. He is an allergist in Little Rock. He and Margie have five children and 10 grandchildren.
Sally and Margie stayed friends through all the breakups and reunions and they are still friends today. Margie and Gene sometimes visit her at her home in Phoenix.
"We keep in touch with most of our friends from high school. It was a wonderful place to grow up," Gene says. "We got to be good friends there and we're still best friends."
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High Profile on 06/22/2014