Romance wasn't a thing between Danny Roach and Lana Phillips until junior high school, and it wasn't much of a thing until a couple of years after that. But their lives have been entwined from the beginning.
Lana started out in Hazen but moved away with her family for several years, returning to that little town as a fifth-grader, only to leave again for a year starting in seventh grade.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “We were in a fifth-grade class. He was a nice guy. He was really shy and quiet.”
He says: “She was not shy.”
My biggest memory from our wedding day is:
She says: “He was late and I was scared he wasn’t coming. He was the very last person to arrive.”
He says: “My brother-in-law was standing behind the preacher, filming the wedding, and when the preacher said, ‘Does anybody have any reason why they shouldn’t get married?’ I glanced over at him and he smiled, because he had been saying we were too young to get married.”
Back again in eighth grade, she and Danny were part of the same small class but they didn't have much in common. Lana is bubbly and musical, Danny shy and athletic. He played quarterback on the football team, she trumpet in the band.
They chatted a bit in eighth and ninth grade, and even went on a few dates in 10th grade.
"There just wasn't a connection," Danny says. "We were still young, and we were still trying to find out what we wanted to do."
Then came the night in 11th grade when Danny was hanging out with the rest of the town's teens at the dairy bar on the main drag.
"I was just talking and this other girl came up and said, 'Danny, let's go riding,' and I said, 'OK.' And I got in my vehicle and Lana was in there, too," he says. "And I was like, 'OK.'"
The three of them rode around for a while. When he circled back by the dairy bar, the other girl jumped out but Lana stayed put. They drove around talking for a while, and he asked what she wanted to do.
"She said, 'Let's go to your house.' I looked at her crazy, because I hadn't taken a girl to my house before," he says.
That's how it started, Lana says. She and Danny were inseparable for the next three years.
Somewhere along the way, they realized they shared a key milestone. They already knew they had been born just a couple of days apart, but they discovered they were born in the same small community hospital and that they actually shared a night together in the hospital's nursery.
Danny was born on Nov. 27, Thanksgiving Day, in the Stuttgart hospital; Lana was born the following Saturday, Nov. 29.
Their mothers had been in the labor ward -- back then, one big room -- at the same time. Danny's mother remembers seeing Lana's mother wheeled into the ward, still subdued by the "twilight sleep" sedation she had gotten during labor, but she was discharged before Lana's mother was alert enough to notice her.
Lana's late grandmother worked in the hospital nursery at the time and was there on her granddaughter's first night in the nursery -- Danny Roach's last night there.
"She jokingly said, 'I thought she saw that little Roach boy trying to get into Lana's crib,'" Lana says.
In high school, Lana kept stats for the basketball team while Danny practiced his moves on the court.
When they weren't involved in school activities they were cruising around town together and hanging out with friends.
After graduation, they both got jobs in town, he at a gas station and then the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, and she with a grocery store. Lana's mother lived in Little Rock, though, and she convinced Lana to come and live there with her. Danny found a job nearby a couple of months later, and they both enrolled in college courses.
They ran errands together, often at Wal-Mart in Sherwood (now Gander Mountain), and Lana regularly pointed out jewelry stores and insisted they could make their relationship official with an engagement ring. "I proposed to him at Wal-Mart," she says, several times, and always half-heartedly, though the joke got serious on one occasion when he said yes. They ordered an engagement ring in February 1989, and when it arrived in May they went together to pick it up at the store.
Danny took the ring from the sales clerk, handed it to Lana and asked if she would marry him.
They exchanged their vows a few months later, on Oct. 7, 1989, at First Baptist Church in Hazen, with about 75 of their friends and family members looking on. They honeymooned in Memphis, where they had their first real argument after getting lost on the way to their hotel.
"It was 11 o'clock at night and we ended up going around the loop two or three times," Lana says. "We could see the sign but we couldn't figure out how to get there."
The Roaches live in Sherwood, and they have one son, Randall Roach, also of Sherwood.
Lana is sales manager at the Crowne Plaza in Little Rock. Danny is construction manager at CenturyLink.
"We like to tell people our story," she says. "It's a good one. And we've been married almost 25 years."
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 09/28/2014