Wanda Price was someone else's date to the Marines ball in November 1948, but Ralph Smith was there at the right time, in the right place, to make her his own. She would stand by him over the years, hoping he would come back to her when he found himself in any wrong place at the wrong time.
The ball, held in the grand Marion Hotel in downtown Little Rock, was a festive affair, with dancing, dinner and a Marine reunion. Wanda went with a lieutenant in the Marine Reserves.
Wanda grew up in Dover and had come to Little Rock about a year earlier to go to business college and find a job. She had made friends with a group of people, one of whom was her date.
"If I remember correctly, we weren't serious about anything," she says.
So when Ralph asked her to dance, she agreed. At evening's end, he asked for her phone number. "I thought, well, I'll never hear from him again," she says. "I can't remember if it was a week or three weeks later, but I did."
They spent many a Friday night together after that, helping their friends, a married couple, finish the week's paperwork for a sales job. They saw movies together, too, but there wasn't time for much else.
Wanda went home to Dover to spend a few days with her family a month or so after they met. While she was there, she was overtaken by the desire to rush back to him.
"Somehow when I was up there it was just like, you know, if I don't go back, he'll be gone," she says. "I remember I rode the bus back down here and I called my friends -- Ralph's mom and dad didn't have a phone -- and told them to tell him I was on my way to their house."
He had to work late that night, though, and couldn't make it to see her. She slept on the couch at their friends' house and very early the next morning he stopped by on the way to running his bread truck route.
"My friend let him in and he just grabbed me," she says. "The minute I came back, that's when we knew we were serious."
Ralph lived with his parents then, and he took her back to their house one night soon after that. His parents were out at the time, and he sat Wanda down in his father's rocking chair and pulled out an engagement ring.
"I can't remember what he said, but I'm sure he asked me if I would marry him. It wasn't very long before his mother and dad came home and I had never met them before that," she says.
They exchanged their vows on Feb. 25, 1949, in the living room of the preacher's home.
Wanda hadn't known Ralph when he served in the Marines during World War II, but she knew that he had joined the Marine Reserves when his term ended.
When the Korean War began, Ralph's unit was called up. Their daughter wasn't yet a year old when she and Wanda saw him off at the train station, thinking they would see him again in a few weeks.
Ralph's unit was originally going to be stationed in California, but plans changed and they were shipped to Korea.
"I had already made up my mind that when he got to California I was going to take the baby and go out there with him," Wanda says. "Well, he didn't stay out there long enough for me to hardly even think about getting a train ticket to go out there if he could find us a place to live. I didn't see him then from the time I put him on the train here and then his unit went overseas and he didn't come back until the next year."
For part of that time, she wasn't sure she would see him again at all. He takes exception to the label he was given -- MIA -- after his unit got cut off from military supply lines in enemy territory, the Chosin Reservoir.
"We were surrounded by, I guess it was the Chinese, back then," he says. "Wanda told me when we got home that I was missing in action, but we weren't missing. We knew exactly where we were."
They were in inhospitable surroundings, to say the least, stinging from freezing weather, with limited rations. Ralph got frostbite and wondered several times whether he would make it out alive. But after struggling to survive for more than a month, he and his comrades walked out and made their way back to their families.
His daughter, Linda Mangiapane, now of St. Louis, was 2 years old when her father came home.
Wanda stayed with his family while he was gone and isn't sure how she would have made it through without their support.
"I guess I felt closer to Ralph when I was with them," she says.
When he got home, things weren't exactly normal.
"You don't ever get back to normal," he says. "I think about all that a lot without wanting to."
But he had finished engineering school before he left for California and he soon found work as an engineer with radio station KARK. He worked for other radio and television stations throughout the years, but it was KARK-TV, Channel 4, he was working for again when he retired.
Their son, David Smith of Alexander, was born nine months after Ralph arrived back in Little Rock. The Smiths have five grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
"Life has been really good and we just want people to know that," Wanda says. "We've lived a long life, and God has blessed us."
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High Profile on 02/01/2015