A date with another girl brought Jim Major to Lillie Raney's church. They married in that same church 73 years ago.
Jim, who hails from Conway, was at First Methodist Church at Eighth and Center streets in Little Rock in 1937 because he was on a date with the minister's daughter.
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
He says: “Be respectful of your mate.”
She says: “Just do the best you can every day because it’s something you don’t want to just walk out on.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “I hadn’t seen her for a day or two and I remember we were waiting before going to get married at First Methodist. I remember when I took her hand and went down to the altar to get married. I could see by her eyes that she was so excited to get married, and I was as excited as she was.”
She says: “I was nervous and excited. We took the train and stayed in a nice hotel in Memphis for two days and then we took the train on to Durham (N.C.) where we were going to live.”
Lillie was there serving cookies and drinks to her fellow youth members. Those who weren't quietly conversing were playing pingpong. "I wasn't dating" at the time, she says. "I had friends but I didn't go with anyone steady."
Lillie was set on finishing her education at Mary Hardin-Baylor College in Belton, Texas, and had little time to devote to romance.
Still, she liked the looks of this visitor -- "He was tall and blond and sophisticated," -- and they talked a bit that evening.
Though no doubt Jim was very taken with the minister's daughter, this little Lillie had pretty auburn hair and adorable freckles, and he couldn't help but believe right away that she was "the one."
"I said, 'That's the one right there that I want to marry,'" he says.
The youth group gathering broke up for the evening. Lillie and Jim had made no plans to see each other, of course. But another serendipitous encounter was just around the corner.
Jim attended Winfield Methodist Church in Little Rock, and it turned out that the youth groups of both churches had planned a picnic at Pinnacle Mountain. Jim was ecstatic to see Lillie there.
"It had been a couple of weeks since I had seen her but I went over there and talked to her, and we went around to the other side of the mountain and took the long way home," he says. "The first time we were ever alone was at Pinnacle Mountain."
Jim soon garnered permission from Lillie's father to visit her at the Raney home, but her father wasn't inclined to give permission for much else.
"Since her father wouldn't let her have but two dates a week, sometimes we would slip around and meet at her brother or sister's house," Jim says. "If we had a real date I would go to her house and we would stay down there in the parlor alone but at 10 o'clock her father would beat his shoe on the floor and I had to leave."
They found simple ways to enjoy each other's company.
"Students don't have very much money," Lillie says. "They can't just run around. I was sort of timid and shy. A lot of times we would go walking together, and Jim taught me how to drive."
He was a bank clerk at Commercial National Bank then, having dropped out of Little Rock Junior College to go to work and support his mother, brother and sister after his father died.
"It was the deep Depression," he says. "I was very fortunate to get any kind of a job. I did that for three or four years before I went to Hendrix College, where I went to prepare myself for the Methodist ministry."
He was away at Hendrix while she was away at Mary Hardin-Baylor.
They corresponded, although Jim says Lillie didn't write as often as he did. And they saw each other when they were home from college for holidays or for summer break.
They had only known each other a few weeks when he wrote a letter telling her he hoped to marry her someday, though that wouldn't actually happen for several more years.
"I knew I had something so I thought I better latch onto it," he says.
Lillie casually dated during college, although she says she was pretty sure from the start that she would marry Jim.
"My parents had been so strict that I felt like I should have a time to see other people to be sure he was the one that I wanted to marry," she says.
She and Jim were wed on Aug. 23, 1942. Jim wore a blue suit and Lillie wore her sister's white wedding dress, sewn by their mother.
Lillie had graduated from Mary Hardin-Baylor with a degree in physical education by then, and Jim had completed a degree in history at Hendrix and was a year from finishing seminary school at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
The Majors, who live in Little Rock, have three children -- Susan Hilton and Thomas Raney Major, both of Little Rock, and James Victor Major of Boston. They also have two grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
A couple of years after they married, they did a five-year stint as missionaries in Santiago, Chile. Neither spoke Spanish but both learned. Jim became fluent enough to preach to his congregation in Spanish; Lillie taught children in church.
Jim led churches for years, and then served as senior vice president at Hendrix, continuing on as a consultant after his retirement.
Lillie got a master's degree in Spanish years after they married and became the Little Rock School District's supervisor of foreign languages.
"My thoughts now are not about the past but about how much longer Jim and I can live together," says Lillie, who is 96.
Jim is 99.
"We have thoughts like that about how fortunate we are that we're here together."
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High Profile on 10/11/2015