Coy Shirley saw Rosa Springer in the congregation at a rural Faulkner County church revival and decided he was going to meet her — and marry her.
The wedding was 74 years ago, and the Mayflower couple still act like newlyweds.
“I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” the 93-year-old said. “Back in my generation, you picked your brides pretty early.”
“I didn’t pay any attention to him,” said Rosa, 90. “I wasn’t studying a boyfriend and all that at that age.”
She was just 14, and he was 17.
She was spending the night with a girlfriend, but Coy introduced himself and confidently told Rosa that he’d see her the next day, and he did. “We got better acquainted, and it sparked from there,” Coy said.
It was 1940 when they met, and Rosa’s mother had died the year before. Her family had moved from Conway to a farm in Mayflower in 1935; their home was where Lumber One in Mayflower is now, which is owned by Rosa’s niece and the niece’s husband.
Coy and his family — nine brothers and sisters, some half siblings — lived in a little community called Runyon near North Little Rock.
With World War II going on, Coy didn’t want to waste any time. Rosa — he calls her Rosie — was 16 (although she said she was 18 to get the license), and he was 19, when they married Sept. 20, 1942, in the pastor’s office of a Pentecostal church in Little Rock.
“We were so crazy — no apartment, house or nothing,” Rosa said, so they lived with her father. “He just thought Coy was all of it,” she said.
A year later, when she was pregnant with their first child, “Uncle Sam called him,” Rosa said.
In September 1943, Coy went to basic training in Missouri; Judy, their first of three daughters, was born in November.
He trained as a combat engineer until he got transferred to a quartermaster truck company. From Missouri, he went to Stinson Field in San Antonio, Texas, to a quartermaster truck battalion that hauled supplies for the 9th Air Force and the 9th Army.
He left Stinson Field for Newport News, Virginia, another staging area for troops.
However, while going to Europe, “we liked to have lost a whole ship,” he said. Coy said he was one of about 5,000 men on the USS Gen. John Pope, a troop transport making its maiden voyage. “We were going over without an escort,” Coy said.
“A German submarine got on our tail,” he said. “A hurricane was building in the north Atlantic, and when the captain found out the submarine was tailing us — the ship we were on was brand new; it was a fast ship — the captain headed to the hurricane. He knew the submarine couldn’t surface to fire torpedoes,” he said. “A day and a night we lumbered in this ship. It would go up like this on these waves,” he said, swooping his hand up in the air. “When it came down, it would peel that paint on the I-beams.”
They were in the hold, two stories down, he said. However, black soldiers were made to sleep up top because the military was segregated, he said. “We lost some people then,” he said.
They landed in Scotland and rode a train to England for additional training, going from one airfield to another as they prepared for the invasion of France.
“We took all kinds of dangerous training before we went over to France,” he said. “We were going through maneuvers and things like that, realizing that we were scheduled to get on a boat anytime and go to France.”
It was June 13, 1944, when Coy landed at Normandy — seven days after D-Day.
“We left England about 1 o’clock in the morning — when we got there, the beach was under fire. It was a very unpleasant sight to see — bodies were still floating in the channel that hadn’t been moved,” he said.
“You’ll never forget it,” Coy said. “We were under fire when we landed there. The Germans were coming over with their fighter planes, strafing the beach.
“We had our trucks waterproofed. I was sitting in the front seat of our maintenance truck with our driver, and water was up inside of our vehicle.”
The staging area was in an apple orchard, he said. The first thing the men did was dig foxholes, where they stayed three weeks. His foxhole buddy was George Heath of Illinois.
“We were having an air raid one night, and the
Germans were bombing — they were still strafing the beach. We were laying there (in the foxhole), anti-aircraft guns were going off at the beach,” he said. About 8 o’clock that night, Coy said he suggested to Heath, “George, let’s get up and watch the fireworks.’ He said, ‘No, I’m tired; I’m going to say in the sack.’ I just had an urge to get up.”
Coy said he stood under the apple tree near the foxhole for five or 10 minutes, watching the anti-aircraft
attack light up the sky.
“It was kind of like a Fourth of July celebration,” he said. “All at once, I heard, “Shhhh!’ A piece of shrapnel as big as my fist came through that apple tree. It went through our pup tents, went through my sleeping bag. I didn’t have to ask Mr. George if he wanted to come out of that sleeping bag,” Coy said with a laugh.
The shrapnel burned a hole in Coy’s sleeping bag, and that would have been the end of him if he had been lying there, Coy said. “We were … about 4 or 5 miles from the front line all the time. In the moving, I lost that piece of shrapnel. I kept it up until just before the war was over.”
Rosa said God protected him.
“That was the Lord got him out of that bag. He knew he had a baby at home he hadn’t seen, and a wife at home,” she said.
Coy said he wrote to his wife every day.
“I’d get letters and pictures,” Rosa said. They both lament the fact they didn’t save the letters, although they still have the photographs.
Coy said Heath enjoyed taking photos and set up a dark room. He taught Coy how to develop photos, too.
“The whole company would bring their film to me and George,” Coy said.
He said the 155 men in his company were mostly truck drivers.
“We didn’t lose a man — not a man — and they had to go to the front line almost to carry supplies.”
Coy was a mechanic, and he injured his back when a transmission fell on him.
“The head mechanic always put me under the truck if we were putting in a transmission,” the 5-foot-2-inch Coy said.
He was on a creeper under a 6x6 cargo truck, and a transmission was on a jack and tied to a rope. Two soldiers, one on each side of the truck, held a rope that was tied to the transmission.
“When they said push the transmission in, I’d push it with my feet,” he said. One of the men decided to light a cigarette, Coy said, and let one hand go from the rope.
“When he did, it was so heavy — it weighed 350 pounds — and the transmission fell on my legs. I raised up and tried to catch it,” he said. “It was just split seconds, and it wrenched my back.” He said the jack rolled, so the full transmission didn’t fall on him.
Still, it caused him back pain the rest of his life. He had to go to the infirmary sometimes to get massages and medicine for his back.
“We didn’t have any garages till we got up into Germany,” he said. “We’d have our shop in a bombed-out building, anything that had a top over it,” he said.
“We followed the American 9th Army, Gen. Bradley, from Normandy to Muenster, Germany,” he said. Coy said the soldiers knew the war was coming to an end. “We knew it was about to be over because Germans were giving up by the thousands,” he said. “Our company commander was coming around telling everybody they’d gotten word the war ended.” He said there was a lot of “shouting and praising.”
Coy got on a converted B-17 to leave Germany, and flew to France to get on a ship to come back to the United States. He got off the boat in New Jersey and rode a troop train to Fort Chaffee near Fort Smith for his discharge; then he took a private bus to Mayflower.
Rosa and Judy, who was almost 3 and had seen her daddy only in pictures, were there to greet him.
“Oh, man, it was so good,” Rosa said, imitating the way she hugged her husband.
“It was just unbelievable,” Coy said about seeing his daughter for the first time.
“Judy wanted to hang on him, and he’d carry her around,” Rosa said.
The Shirleys stayed with Rosa’s father, then bought a house.
“You couldn’t hardly find a house; people were renting their rooms over carports,” Coy said. Soldiers were coming home, and they were looking for places to live.
The Shirleys got a brand-new home on 35th street in Levy.
“That was where we started our married life, really,” Coy said.
He was trained as an electrician through the GI Bill, he said, and worked at a heating-and-air company in Levy.
He also worked for a heating-and-air company in California and for his brother, William Shirley, in North Little Rock. Eventually, Coy started Shirley Heating and Electric in Mayflower, across the street from his wife’s old homeplace. He ran the business for 27 years, closing it
in 1979.
The couple moved to Greenbrier in 1993 and built a house, but the highway was dangerous, they said. After Coy had a wreck (not his fault, he said), their daughters insisted that they move, and the Shirleys moved back to Mayflower 10 years ago this month.
“I just couldn’t stay away from Mayflower,” Rosa said.
Their daughters are Judy Noel of Sherwood, Linda Thurman of Conway and Nancy White of Parker, Colorado, who was on her way to stay with them this week to help celebrate their anniversary. The couple have five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
Overall, the Shirleys are in good health. Rosa said no one can believe Coy is 93. She had a small stroke a few years ago, she said, and fell and broke her pelvis in November 2015.
Coy is a diabetic, and he has undergone back surgeries because of his war injury. He almost died in 1985 after his first back surgery, Rosa recalled. The doctors told her they couldn’t stop the bleeding,
and he got a staph infection, but antibiotics saved him.
“Thank the Lord I’ve still got that sweet thing,” Rosa said. She spontaneously got up to kiss him on the top of his head and hug him. “Oh, sweetie pie.”
Their 74-year marriage “couldn’t be any better. He’s been a best friend. I couldn’t live without him. I said I hope we die at the same time,” she said.
“She’s been a wonderful wife, and I wouldn’t take another,” Coy said. “There’s been misunderstandings sometimes, but we never took it very far; it never affected our marriage.”
He likes to tell people the key to their long marriage is that he learned to say, “Yes, dear.”
They used to go camping a lot, and he owned property at Nimrod Lake, “my fishing hole,” he said, but he sold it. Rosa never really cared for fishing.
“I’ve had her in a boat twice in our married life,” he said, laughing.
They have framed black-and-white photographs in their living room of themselves decades younger.
“Wasn’t she pretty? She’s still pretty,” he said.
“You know what we do at night? He sits on that cushion,” she said, pointing to the end of the couch, “and I sit over here, and we hold hands. I sit right up against him. I’ll bet we court and love more than anybody. He’s so cute! I can’t believe you picked out a little old girl and didn’t know who she was, and it turned out like this,” she said to her husband.
“Hey, she’s the love of my life,” Coy said, holding his hands palms up in the air, shrugging and smiling.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.