The first time Barbara Heim went on a date with Richard Yada was different from when they went on their first date together.
Barbara had finished high school at Mount St. Mary Academy in Little Rock and was working at Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. in 1963. Her co-worker had graduated from North Little Rock High School and was occasionally dating Richard, a classmate who was then a sophomore at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She had a date with him set toward the end of the summer and she decided Barbara should find a date, too. They could double.
On our wedding day:
She says: “I wasn’t nervous until my sister, who was 13 and who was the only attendant, got herself all worked up and thought she was sick. It was her nerves because her big sister was leaving her. She got herself together finally. But in the meantime I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
He says: “We went back to her house to change after the wedding but we didn’t have a key and no one else was home so we were locked out for a while. It was probably 10-15 minutes but it was July and it was hot. I had on a suit and a tie.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
She says: “I think you have to go into it with commitment, with the decision that we’re going to get married and we’re going to make this work. You have to have some humor in your life. You have to be able to laugh about some things because it’s dull if you don’t. And you have to pray for each other every day.”
He says: “Try to do as much as you can together and enjoy life.”
"So they got me a blind date with someone else," Barbara says. "That's how I met Richard -- he had a date with someone else and I had a date with someone else."
Barbara's blind date was Richard's friend, and as the friend greeted her at the front door, Richard sat in the car stunned and agog. "I thought, 'Wow, she is good-looking.' She was cute, vibrant ... of course, I couldn't express too much of that."
The four of them saw How the West Was Won, and when it was over they went to Richard's friend's place to watch the Miss America pageant on television.
Donna Axum was representing Arkansas that night and they all wanted to see how she fared, especially Richard, who knew her from college.
"She helped me with registration in my freshman year. I was just a country boy and my parents just dropped me off and said 'Bye,'" Richard says. "I knew nothing about registration. She and another girl were standing on the steps and I said, 'Can you help me with registration?' She was very helpful."
At the end of the evening, Barbara said goodbye to Richard. She thought he was a nice guy, but that was the extent of it. He was of a different mind, and when he got back to Fayetteville, he started penning notes to Barbara.
"I just said, 'Hi, how are you?'" he says. "Nothing exciting. But I kept my foot in the door."
Barbara began dating Richard's friend, the blind date, and Richard didn't want to intrude upon that, but he was interested enough in her that he would call to chat when he was home for weekends or holidays.
"I just thought he was being nice," Barbara says.
They got to know each other that way, though.
"He would laugh at the silly things I would say or do. He was good-natured. And as I got to know him I could tell he was a good person and we had values that were similar, as far as family and things like that," she says.
She learned that Richard was born at the Japanese relocation camp in Rohwer and when he was about 2 his parents became sharecroppers. They later started a truck farm and provided vegetables to grocery stores and a roadside vegetable stand. They had converted their business to a greenhouse farm by the time he went to college, supplying bedding plants to nearby nurseries, and when Richard was home he was expected to help with the family business.
Around Easter 1964, after she and his friend had ceased going out and his friend was seeing another girl, he asked Barbara to go out with him.
"I felt him working up to it," Barbara says. "He asked me and I said, 'Yeah,' and he said, 'Are you sure?' And I said, 'Yeah!'"
Their first date was to another movie, but they don't remember which one.
Their letters and phone calls continued, along with the occasional road trip Barbara took to Fayetteville with a friend who was also seeing someone at the University of Arkansas. They had a mutual friend in a sorority house and stayed there while they visited their boyfriends.
Richard was back in Little Rock near Easter 1965 and had taken Barbara to see another movie, this time in his brother's snazzy convertible. They were sitting in that car when he proposed.
As with the first formal date, he'd been leading up to this as well, though less covertly.
"He was saying it a lot, 'Will you marry me, will you marry me?'" Barbara says. She can't remember what number he was on when she acceded.
Richard got a job in Fayetteville so he could buy her the ring he knew she had seen and admired in a store window in Little Rock.
They exchanged vows on July 31, 1965, in Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church in Little Rock.
Richard had joined the Air Force and was to be stationed at Mather Air Force Base near Rancho Cordova, Calif., so that's where they headed the following January, not long after they discovered they were expecting their first child, Karen Yada, who now lives in Fort Smith.
Daughters Kay Shields and Kathy Patton live in Little Rock, as do their folks, who have been here since 1970, following stints in Merced, Calif., and Bossier City, La., and a six-month tour overseas for Richard. Today, he is a certified financial planner and certified public accountant.
The Yadas also have five grandchildren, all of whom will celebrate their 50th anniversary with them.
"It's gone by fast," Richard says. "We've had a lot of fun. We've got good friends. Life is good. We're living the American Dream."
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High Profile on 07/05/2015