John Ed Smith knew Frankie Weckel back when she hid behind her mother's skirts.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I was at the garage, my dad’s office.”
He says: “I didn’t think much of her. She wasn’t very big then. She wasn’t very old.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I wore a pale, pale blue crepe dress — you couldn’t buy clothes back then hardly because of the war. I didn’t have a wedding dress because you couldn’t find one. He wore a blue, dark blue suit with a white shirt and a tie.”
He says: “I wanted to get out of town. I wasn’t really interested in the celebration. We needed to get 60 or 70 miles down the road before night.”
My advice for a lasting marriage:
She says: “A lot of give and a lot of take.”
He says: “You have to be serious about wanting to be married. We took our vows seriously.”
"I've known him since I was 7," says Frankie, now 90. John Ed is 92.
Frankie was at her father's garage in Clayton, N.M., when she first met John Ed. She and her mother stopped by on occasion just to say hello and sometimes John Ed was there with his father, a rancher.
"My dad did all of John Ed's dad's work on his trucks," she says. "We just kind of grew up together. I didn't really know him that well because he was always at the ranch and he missed an awful lot of school. But I knew his family because they were such good customers of my dad's."
In 1942, when Frankie was a junior in high school, she was at the local drugstore with some of her best friends when he made a bold move to win her over.
"We were sitting in a booth in the drugstore and this lady came back with the biggest banana split I had ever seen. And she said, 'That fella up there at the fountain sent this to you, Frankie Rae,'" she says.
"You know, I really liked banana splits," she says.
John Ed, then a senior, was vice president of the Future Farmers of America at their high school. His best friend was president. "They were planning a barn dance one Friday night in the gymnasium and he asked me to go," she says. "That was our first date."
He bought her some stationery and she began writing to him at the ranch. He wrote her back.
John Ed joined the Navy, and Frankie graduated from high school and went to college at Eastern New Mexico College in Portales, N.M. When he was discharged, John Ed took Frankie on a date to a horse racing track about 90 miles away from Clayton.
"On the way back he pulled up on the side of the road next to a Coca-Cola billboard," she says.
John Ed proposed then and there.
"I knew that that was it and I said yes, and then he immediately said, 'Now I'm going to tell you what. We're going to have to live in the bunkhouse.' And he said, 'We don't have a bathroom.'"
The ranch house had burned during Frankie's senior year of high school in 1943, the same year her mother died. John Ed's parents had moved to Albuquerque.
John Ed and Frankie were married a week after that roadside proposal, on Oct. 12, 1946, at Frankie's father's house. Frankie's best friend's mother hosted a nice reception for the newlyweds. Frankie overheard her telling someone near the punch bowl about how this marriage would not last.
"She knew both of us so well and we're so different. I'm flighty and I love people," says Frankie. "John Ed is quiet and not real outgoing."
They did, in fact, experience conflict.
"We had our first argument when we left the reception. I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay there and visit with everybody, and John Ed wanted to get on the road," she says. "But other than that it has worked well for us over the years."
Frankie and John Ed drove to Mexico for their honeymoon. They called Frankie's father on the way.
"He said 'Come home, we're having the most awful blizzard we've ever had,'" she says. "We had those cattle, and the man we had looking after them didn't know thunder from up. So we came home and John Ed went to the ranch for three weeks." They lost 78 of their 203 cattle to the storm.
Later they settled into life in the bunkhouse, though Frankie's brother picked her up in their father's plane a couple of times a week and flew her back to their father's house so she could take a bath.
Frankie's family sold their cattle a year later, bought a car and headed to Arkansas to see the construction of the dam at Bull Shoals. They stopped for a sweet treat in Harrison.
"We had [a] new car, and it had New Mexico tags, and we went inside and came back out and there was a Realtor sitting on the fender. He said, 'Oh, I've got a farm I want to show you,'" Frankie says. "We had nothing to do so we went with the Realtor to look at the farm -- and we bought it."
A drought soon forced John Ed to look for work off the farm. He got a job working with the state Highway Department, and before long he began studying engineering in hopes of being promoted. Once he finished, the agency sent him to Batesville, with the title of resident engineer. Frankie worked as a secretary before opening a doughnut shop in Batesville. She has since sold it and they are both retired.
Their son, John Ed Smith III, also lives in Batesville. Frankie and John Ed have two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
"It's just been so fast," Frankie says of 70 years of marriage. "I can't believe I'm 90 years old."
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High Profile on 11/13/2016