Karen Fults was sleeping when an exotic-looking young man showed up at her house to borrow a bed.
Karen was almost 17 when her mother came into her Tucson, Ariz., bedroom and asked her to help move a bed she was giving to an elderly neighbor for a new boarder. The boarder, Fab Duran, was a Colombian student from the University of Arizona.
"I wasn't fully dressed," Karen says. "My makeup wasn't on or anything like that."
She helped Fab move the bed into his bedroom, and then he went back to ironing a shirt for work. Before he could finish, "I took the iron from him and ironed his shirt," she says.
It was nine days before Christmas. Since Fab didn't have any family close by, Karen suggested to her mother that they invite him over to celebrate the holiday.
"I just wanted to make him feel welcome. I always have been one to pick up strays," she quips.
Fab, who was 21, had been living in the dorm, but had found a room to rent through the Catholic ministry for youth on campus. He sought to move from the dorm in hopes of immersing himself in American culture. When he was invited into an American family's home for a holiday, he jumped at the chance.
"We lived in an area of Tucson called Winterhaven, and we had to decorate the outside of our house for Christmas," Karen says. "My mother had a flocked lavender Christmas tree with purple and gold ornaments, and she had blown-up reindeer running across the yard with a Santa sleigh and everything."
Fab's landlady and Karen's mother were friends, and Karen dropped by the landlady's home frequently, often unannounced, to get to know Fab and include him in social activities.
"Drop-ins were something that never happened in my own country," says Fab, who queried his landlady about the appropriateness of Karen's visits. "She told me it was an accepted thing."
He began dropping by Karen's house in return, and as New Year's Eve approached, he invited her to join him for pizza, a movie and a party with his Colombian friends.
"His English was not good," Karen recalls. "His reading and writing were very good but his spoken English was very difficult to understand and he wanted to improve that."
They communicated effectively enough, though, and their cultural differences only served to further pique their interest in each other.
They went out often after that, taking in sports and entertainment on campus and occasionally driving with friends to Baja, Calif., or to Mexico for some sightseeing. Fab took Karen to the senior prom that year.
"I had never had a plan of going to prom because I belonged to a Baptist church that didn't believe in dancing. I took special classes to learn how to dance so we could go to the prom together," she says. "I didn't care anymore, at that point, what the church thought."
Fab's electrical engineering coursework took much of his time.
"She would come over while I was studying and prepare meals," he says. "I came to decide she was indispensable."
They got engaged about two years after they met.
"I guess it was kind of just an understanding," Karen says. "He was planning to go back to South America as soon as he graduated and I agreed that would be a good thing because I thought that would be a very interesting life, very different and very challenging, and I was up for the challenge."
Fab's landlady and Karen's mother were in the midst of playing bridge when they shared their news.
"It was my mother and his landlady and two of their cronies that played every week who had known us the last two years, and they were really excited," she says.
They were married on Sept. 12, 1964.
Their plans to move to Colombia were delayed when they learned they were expecting their first child, and then derailed altogether when it made more sense to stay and raise their family in the United States.
The Durans have five children -- Victoria Protheroe of Little Rock, Arthur Duran of Russellville, Eduard Duran of Bloomington, Ill., Sylvia Baillie of Manchester, England, and Michael Duran, who is deceased. They also have 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
They have moved many more beds over the years, as Fab's career in the nuclear industry took them to 12 states -- some more than once -- before they settled for good in Russellville a few years ago. Karen dropped out of college when their first child was born but graduated from Arkansas Tech University at Russellville in 1993 with a degree in social services. Both are retired.
Over the years they have embraced their differences. Karen has come to accept, for example, that Fab operates on "Latin time." That is to say, he's temporally nonchalant.
"She still takes time a lot more seriously than I do," he says. "That's OK."
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 05/25/2014