Don Waterworth left an impression on Beth Wooton at her first Parents Without Partners meeting. "I thought he was kind of a weirdo, sitting there flying paper airplanes," she says.
That opinion has changed since February 1971.
The first time I met my spouse:
She says: “I thought he needed to dress better and not be flying airplanes backward. And I thought he sure did dress strange.”
He says: “I thought I saw an angel. She was everything a poor old country boy from the Ozarks could want.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “Things were totally chaotic. We got done in one day what was supposed to take three days. It told me what kind of man I was going to marry.”
He says: “Our little girl, Robyn, cried the whole time. She just wasn’t happy about anything.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
She says: “Put God first.”
He says: “Love is up to you. You can talk bad about someone or you can talk good about them, but what you say is what you’re going to feel.”
"I guess that was an early version of the computer dating stuff," Beth says of Parents Without Partners. "It was an organization for parents who had been divorced or widowed. You had to have a child 18 years old or younger to belong and you had to be single, of course."
Beth's daughters were 5 and 1. Don's son was 15. Both were divorced and living in Wichita Falls, Texas.
"I didn't really want to go but I had told myself I needed to get out," she says.
The gathering was at a member's home. Beth was in the kitchen talking with some new friends when, from a sofa in the living room, Don motioned for her to come over.
A chief master sergeant stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base, he had been to Parents Without Partners meetings in Cape Cod, Mass., when he was stationed at Otis Air Force Base.
Their conversation was monumental.
"He told me he was going to marry me and I told him he was an idiot," Beth says.
Don was sitting there on the sofa, folding lined notebook paper from a stack on the counter into airplanes, tossing them into the air and watching as they circled and landed back in his lap.
"Part of our first conversation was that he told me about how you fold the nose of the airplane to make it do that," she says.
That's more of their initial interaction than Don recalls.
"I remember more about all the conversations that went on around us than what she said because she really didn't say too much back to me."
Her opinion of him hadn't changed much when the party ended. But when he called the next day and invited her to another party, she agreed to go.
"I thought it was another Parents Without Partners thing," she says.
It was an Amway party, actually -- Don was a distributor. Beth didn't buy any Amway products but she did enjoy Don's company.
"I had decided he was still an idiot if he thought I was going to marry him, but I didn't think he was a total idiot," Beth says. "We just had ourselves a good time, and he walked me to the car and kissed me for the first time -- I still remember that kiss. I still get butterflies 44 years later."
Beth's mother refused to baby-sit her daughters while they went on subsequent dates.
"She told me that whoever dated me was going to date me with the kids, that I was a package deal," Beth says. "When Don wanted to go out I told him that and, goofy guy, he took that package deal on."
One of their first real dates was to a carnival.
"He's an intellectual type of person. He's very smart. So I was told about the dangers of carnival rides compared to airplanes, because I had a fear of airplanes," she says. "I got statistics and lectures. He's usually right, I hate to say."
They found other kid-friendly outings over time, but Beth stuck to her guns about marriage.
On the morning of July 19, 1971, however, Beth woke up and called to say that if he was going to marry her it would have be that very day.
"I can't tell you why I did that," Beth says.
There was a three-day wait for blood-testing in Texas at the time, but Don convinced Beth's doctor to do her test right then and then got his test done on base.
"He found a preacher and I had a beautiful bouquet of red roses," she says.
Their children were there for the ceremony, and the following weekend, they all left for a honeymoon in Arkansas so Beth could meet Don's mother.
Beth and Don lived in Colorado for a while, then moved to Germany. In 1979, Don retired from the Air Force, and they moved to Pocahontas. Beth was a juvenile intake officer for Randolph County for 28 years. Now she is jail secretary for the Randolph County sheriff's office.
Beth's daughters, Missy Phillips and Robyn Thompson, both live in Pocahontas. Don's son, Len Waterworth, lives in Houston. Their son, Lyle, lives in Jonesboro.
"Our kids grew up brothers and sisters," Beth says. "I called Lenny a stepson one time and the girls jumped on [me] for it, so I never did that again. They're all siblings. We also have a bonus daughter, Leah Evers. She lives in Jonesboro."
The Waterworths have 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
"I told the Lord that I wanted Him to pick this one for me," she says of her husband. "I would just say that God has had His hand in this since the day we met."
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 09/13/2015