Alice Hilburn's first glimpse of Paul Stovall was at the Rio Vista Resort on the Spring River in Hardy. She pointed the Arkansas State College football player out to her friends and declared "That's the boy I'm going to date" once she started classes at the Jonesboro college (now Arkansas State University). She was just 16 at the time, but some people just have all the perspicacity.
She knew Paul was a football player because of what he and his friends were wearing and because she recognized one of the guys he was with -- Eddie Romeo, a player who made news by coming to the school from New York.
On our wedding day:
She says: “I was too young to really be scared, I guess. I was just so happy that Paul loved me and was going to marry me.”
He says: “I was nervous. The best man and I were waiting for her to come down the aisle and I remember asking him, ‘What are we doing?’ and he said, ‘You’re about to get married, young man.’”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “You have to give and take and you have to trust in your spouse and trust in the Lord.”
He says: “When things go bad, you’ve got to sit down and talk it out. You’ve got to love one another and know you’re going to continue to love one another and you can make it.”
"You could tell them, too," she says. "They were walking around with their muscles and acting very arrogant."
Alice had finished high school a year early, so it was only a few weeks from the time she spied Stovall until she stepped onto campus.
"My friends knew I was pretty headstrong," she says. "They said, 'He's too old for you, Alice.' I said, 'No, he's not either.' But they were for me all the way."
Once classes started, Alice set out to find her man.
"I had not forgotten who I had seen and who I wanted to date," Alice says.
It wasn't long before Paul noticed her.
"Everywhere I turned, there she was," he says. "I don't know if she had it mapped out or what. But we got to talking and I asked her brother, who was in school, if it would be all right if I went out with his sister. He said, 'Yeah, that would be all right but I'm going with you.'"
Being everywhere Paul turned was intentional, she admits.
"I absolutely had to be, because he was the best looking thing on the campus at that time," she says. "His reputation went before him and that's why my brother wanted to go with us on our first date."
Paul took Alice -- and her brother, his teammate -- to a dance and then to a drive-in for a bite to eat after a football game. "I took him home to my mother -- to let mother and daddy see him -- as soon as he would go," she says.
Her brother didn't go with them to Walnut Ridge that weekend, after just their third or fourth date, but her younger brothers still lived at home and they were happy to grill the new guy.
"They all had to meet him and talk to him and what have you," she says. "He was an outstanding football player and that made him important to all three of my brothers."
Paul went to summer school that year so, naturally, Alice did too. He was injured during the first game that fall and was out for the season. He was expecting to be drafted into the Army, and he and Alice began discussing marriage.
"I said I didn't know if we were going to be engaged or not because I would be left there and he would be off in the wild blue yonder," Alice says. "And he said, 'Well, why don't we just get married.'"
Paul certainly didn't want to risk losing Alice to someone else.
"I just felt like that was the thing to do," he says. "I didn't want to go off and leave her. Maybe when I got back in a couple of years she wouldn't be there."
They exchanged their vows about two weeks later, on Sept. 25, 1955, in a Methodist church in Walnut Ridge.
Paul's mother rode in the car to the church with him that day, and on the way she read him a letter she had brought.
"It said, 'Greetings, you have been drafted by the United States Army,'" he says. "I had to report in one month, but I got it extended. I didn't have to report until November."
Alice finished the fall semester, then moved to Fort Polk, La., to be with her new husband. She went back to school later and finished her degree. Both she and Paul had long careers in education, with her retiring from the Little Rock School District as director of reading and him retiring as an assistant principal in the North Little Rock School District.
They are the parents of four living children, Laura McDowell of North Little Rock, Charlie Stovall and Todd Stovall of Cherokee Village, and Matt Stovall of Oswego, Ill. Harriet Ann Stovall died in childhood. They have eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Alice is proud of the fact that she was so tenacious about getting his attention.
"She hasn't changed in 60 years," Paul says. "She's very persistent. She just keeps on until you just say, 'Go ahead and do it.' We've made it pretty well."
If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 378-3496 or email:
cjenkins@arkansasonline.com
High Profile on 04/12/2015